Animism; or, Thought currents of primitive peoples

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ANIMISM

OR

THOUGHT CURRENTS OF
PRIMITIVE PEOPLES

BY

GEORGE WILLIAM GILMORE

'BOSTON
MARSHALL JONES COMPANY

MDCCCCXIX

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COPyRIGHT'I9I9'BT
MARSHALL JONES COMPANT

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TBE-FIIKFTOll-PaESS
HOXWOOD-KAS S-U-S-A

T'o my Son

PREFACE

THE result of recent historical studies,
whether on anthropological, sociological,
archeological, or religious lines, has brought
into ever clearer vision as the substratum of all
civilizations that stage of culture from which
this book takes its title. One consequence
is: general recognition of animism as a life
fadtor, the power of which is not yet exhausted,
the study of which fascinates because of its
almost infinite variety and its persistent force.
The words "animism," "animistic," have come
to fall ever so lightly from tongue and pen and
meet us at every turn. Yet what animism is
few who use the term adequately realize.
Though Sir E. B. Tylor in his imperishable
monograph on Primitive Culture exhibited
many of its phenomena and blocked out the
main lines of investigation over forty years ago,
comparatively few understand its significance
or are acquainted with its manifestations even

viii PREFACE

yet. Fewer still comprehend the doings and
beliefs as adlual or realize the state of mind —
operations of perception and reason — of those
whose adts and beUefs we call animistic.

There seemed to be room, then, for a small
volume which should exhibit the phenomena
and the related and inferred beliefs of this
complex stage in a simple manner, with suffi-
ciently numerous citations to illustrate clearly,
yet without the overlay of too abundant refer-
ences. The references here given have been
drawn almost entirely from very recent and
authoritative sources gathered in the writer's
own reading, easily accessible in the current of
books on travel now pouring from the press.
Most of the volumes to which reference has
been made in this discussion belong to the
twentieth century. Moreover these sources
are primary. Recourse has seldom been had
even to so valuable a coUedlion of fads as
Eraser's quite exhaustive Golden Bough in its
third edition. The facfts there adduced were
employed by the talented author for quite
another end than the present writer's, and this
might easily have led to confusion.

What value a knowledge of the features of
this agglomerate of ads and beliefs has be-

PREFACE ix

comes evident when it is remembered that over
half the population of the globe is animistic in
its main features of faith and adion, that a
large part of humanity entertains beliefs only-
one remove away from this and regards as
fundamental a philosophy of life grounded in
animistic thought, and that at least three basal
tenets of Christianity itself are common to
Christians and animists. Japanese, Koreans,
Chinese, the larger part of the population of
India, the North Asiatic tribes, Oceanicans,
Africans, and American Indians are, or were
recently, animists. No stage of culture, no
great religion, has ever been able to disown
some of the commonest heirlooms left by
primitive modes of thinking. From the stand-
points both of culture and of religion animism
may be described (not defined) as the taproot
which sinks deepest in racial human experience
and continues its cellular and fibrous structure
in the tree trunk of modern convidtion. It is
not less important than the surface roots of
accrued beliefs that branch out on all sides,
drawing a wide-sourced sustenance, while the
taproot penetrates the subsoil of man's most
intimate soul-substance.

Hardly less interesting is the fad^ that in

X PREFACE

some fundamentals — religious and social —
the advanced thought of the day is returning
to some convidlions essential to animistic
culture. One would not be drawing the long
bow were he to affirm that in that stage every
ad: in life had a religious aspedl. Nothing a
man could do but might be regarded as either
pleasing to spirits or the reverse. One might
say that animists went far beyond Matthew
Arnold's didlum that conduA is three-fourths of
life — for them it embraced the whole of life.
That is precisely what advanced thinkers are
maintaining today, and in that tenet is the
best promise for improvement in modern con-
ditions among all classes.

In another aspeft, too, the social, we are
returning to early conceptions. Under totem-
ism, the foundation of which is an animistic
view of things non-human, the individualism
that became so marked a feature in some
philosophies of the last centuries and gave
impetus even to revolutions was unknown.
The charaAeristic of totemic and derived
society was much nearer that slogan which has
now advanced beyond the circle of purely
sociahstic propaganda: "Each for all and all
for each."

PREFACE xi

Theologically also we find ourselves return-
ing to old, old views of man's relation to the
supernatural. The comparatively recent doc-
trine of sin is being discarded. The implaca-
bility of Deity, the notion of that Deity's
infinity as the measure of offence, making of
sin an enormity that clouds eternally the face
of God and requires an infinite and exaAly
equivalent penalty, no longer holds the entire
field. On the other hand, the adl itself, its
effed: on the doer and his kind, its indelibility
of effedt on the one side, and the propitiability
of the offended Spirit, his desire to have man
reinstate himself in divine favor — the willing-
ness to come more than half way (to state the
matter in the language of every-day life) — are
now standing out in relief.

It seems hardly necessary to remark that, of
course, in all these cases the effedl is not that
of the return of a circle's circumference into
itself. There has been marked, if spiral,
progress, progress comparable to that of the
earth in the solar system toward its distant
goal in the constellation of Hercules. The one
encouraging result of this study is that from
the beginning the heart of man was essentially
sound, though his vagaries were many during

xii PREFACE

the centuries in which he was feeling his way.
To use a significant term, man has ever been
essentially theotropic, though he was not
always conscious of the direftion of his tropism.

In studying this subjed, then, we are engaged
in discovering the paths our own ancestors have
trodden, and our gratitude is due them for
leading us with increasing certitude to a nobler
way of thought, so that we see in the heavens
not deities, but the work of One; and in the
earth'the effedls of that same One's immanence,
his gift to his sons and daughters.

The author takes this opportunity to ac-
knowledge with gratitude the kindness of Mr.
Francis Medhurst who has read all the proofs
and offered many valuable suggestions.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Animistic Stage of Culture —

The Case Stated i

II. The Discovery of the Soul . . 17

III. The Soul's Nature 35

IV. The External or Separable Soul 49
V. Parity of Being 59

VI. Belief in "Free Spirits" ... 95
VII. "Free Spirits" — Their Constitu-
tion AND Activities 103

VIII. Logical Consequences of Parity

of Being 117

IX. Death not Always Regarded as

Inevitable 133

X. The Continued Existence of the

Soul 145

XI. Modifications of the Idea of Con-
tinuance 153

XII. Condition of the Discarnate Soul 163

XIII. The Home of the Soul . . . 181

XIV. Descensus Averni 195

XV. Worship 201

XVI. Residua of Animism 219

XVII. Literature to which Reference is

Made in this Volume . 229

Index 243

xiii

THE ANIMISTIC STAGE OF CUL-
TURE—THE CASE STATED

ANIMISM

I

THE ANIMISTIC STAGE OF CUL-
TURE— THE CASE STATED

'TpHE following narrative, taken from The
-*■ Japan Weekly for March i6, 1916,
recounts the story of an event occurring in
that land of "advanced civilization" in the
winter of 191 5-16, and some of the sequelae.

Death of the Suma Snake

"The huge snake that had been leading a
precarious existence at the Suma Garden
during the last three years — a captive in a
different clime from that in which it was born
— recently died, unable to bear the rigours of
the winter. Although the reptile was a mag-
nificent specimen of its species, as it measured
25 feet in length and 28 inches round the
thickest part, it never made itself unpleasantly
obtrusive and most of its time at Suma was

3

4 ANIMISM.

spent in lethargic retirement. When the de-
mise of the snake was made known in the
neighbourhood much sympathy was mani-
fested among its many acquaintances, who
asked the management of the Garden to bury
the snake in the vicinity with due ceremony.
It was accordingly interred in the pine groves
at the rear of the Kagetsu restaurant.

"Someone made the discovery on looking
at an almanac that the day on which the
reptile died was a Day of the Snake, and
remembered an old superstition that toothache
may be cured by worshipping a snake. The
grave of the Suma snake consequently began
to be visited by the superstitious, who pro-
claimed to the world the supernatural means
of healing toothache by worshipping there.
The report has since travelled far and wide,
and scores of people are visiting the grave
every day, bringing much gain to the Hyogo
tramway, who need no faith to be assured of
the benefits accruing from the virtues of the
departed snake. Some of the people whose
toothache has been cured by the spirit of the
snake have decided to build a shrine on the
ground where the reptile was buried. The
place has already been fenced in and a sign

ANIMISTIC STAGE OF CULTURE 5

eredled preparatory to the commencement of
work."

The exhibit is therefore that of belief in
the continued existence and exercise of benevo-
lent activity on behalf of man of a snake
which had according to our notions passed
completely out of life and beyond any possible
potency to affeft human existence. It shows
one of the charadleristic phenomena of the
stage of culture we are to examine, a stage
which, as we shall discover, is a present fadt
over a large part of the globe. ~-

In Gen. 28: 10-22 occurs the interesting
account of a night in Jacob's life, his inter-
pretation of it, and the ensuing course of
adlion. The two noteworthy events, from
the present point of view, are (i) the dream,
with Jacob's conclusion that it revealed to
him the fadt that the place where he lay was
an abiding place of deity; (2) the deity .was
evidently in the stone, or was the stone, as is
shown by the anointing .joL-it.,^ — This, story,
could be paralleled in its essentials from many
sources. Again, in Josh. 24:27, Joshua is
represented declaring of a certain stone: "it
hath heard all the words, ... It shairire

6 ANIMISM

therefore a witness against you." And, once
more, AAs 19: 35 makes mention of an objedl
of worship which "fell from Jupiter," i.e.,
"evTdently a meteorite.

These three fadls taken together, viz., the
importance of a dream and the performance
of worshipful adts upon or attribution of
sentience to a stone, bring into notice a cul-
tural condition, a method of thinking, which
is by common consent called animistic. Ani-
mism is by many regarded as the earliest form
which religion took, and as the root from
which was derived all religious beliefs which
the world has known, and was also the
earliest basis of all that is dignified by the
name of culture. Moreover, we may trace
its eflFedts and its adlion into the present.^
Others, however, regard it as not the primary,
but as a secondary, stage in mental and reli-
gious development, seeking the primary in a
vaguer series of beliefs to which they give the
name "naturism " or " dynamism." ^ Our pres-
ent concern is with Animism.

1 McDougall, Body and Mind. A History and Defence of
jinnntsm.

' Cf. Clodd, Animism; and Leuba, A Psychological Study of
Religion.

ANIMISTIC STAGE OF CULTURE 7

And what is this? Menzies defines it as
"the worship of spirits as opposed to that of
Gods." ^ To this E. B. Tylor, whose work *
is facile princeps among the expositions of
animism, might objeA that it supposes a
sharp dividing Hne between spirits and gods
which has no existence in fadt and is therefore
arbitrarily drawn. It is, perhaps, impossible
to state where the worship of spirits stops
and that of gods begins, to decide exadlly
where the spirit shades into the deity. Who
can say exaAly the moment when the con-
ception of a being which has been but one of
a host of spirits has passed into that of a
state of divinity ? Such transitions have been
made.^ Accordingly, Tylor would define an-
imism as "the doArine of spirits or of spiritual
beings."® He furthermore proposes as a min-
imum definition of religion "belief in spiritual
beings." ^ While one may criticize this last
as leaving out the objedive result of "belief
in spiritual beings" in worship or cult, Tylor

' History of Religion, p. 39.

* Primitive Culture, new ed., London, 1903.

» E.g., EnlU of Babylonia; cf. A. Sayce, Hihbert Ledures,
1887, p. 103.

• Primitive Culture, i. 425.
' lb., i. 324.

8 ANIMISM

is altogether right in asserting that, whatever
the original condition of mankind, such belief
is found among all races, even the lowest,
concerning whom exacfl knowledge is possessed.

Just criticism may be passed, however,
upon Tylor's definition of animism as so vague
that it gives no grip upon the adtual conditions
which attend an animistic stage of thought or
upon that thought itself. It is necessary,
therefore, to point out that the word represents
a stage in the psychological development of
man, in his cultural unfolding, in which his
conceptions (i) of himself and (2) of the
world about him differ essentially from those
of "civilized" man. From the point of view
ormoderrr-|Tsyeb©logy, he may be said to
possess as yet only an unintegrated con-
sciousness. He does not distinguish himself
in kind from objedts that are about him.
As one writer declares:

"A Central Australian pointing to a photo-
graph of himself will say, 'That one is just
the same as me, so is a kangaroo (his totem).'
We say the Central AustraHan 'belongs to
the kangaroo tribe'; he knows better, he is
kangaroo. Now it is this persistent affirma-
tion of primitive man in the totemistic stage

ANIMISTIC STAGE OF CULTURE 9

that he is an animal or a plant, that he is a
kangaroo or an opossum . . . that instantly
arrests our attention," etc.*

To man in the advanced stage of thinking
to which civilized peoples have attained such
a condition as this appears almost unbeliev-
able. And yet expert testimony to this effedl
is abundantly available. Thus Professor Hob-
house says of the thinking of men in this stage:

"One conception melts readily into another,
just as in primitive fancy a sorcerer turns into
a dragon, a mouse, a stone, and a butterfly
"without the smallest difficulty. Hence simil-
arity is treated as if it were physical identity.
The physical individuality of things is not
observed. The fadl that a thing was mine
makes it appear as though there were some-
thing of me in it, so that by burning it you
make me smart. The borders or limits of
things are not marked out, but their influence
and their capacity to be influenced extends,
as it were, in a misty halo over everything
conneded with them in any fashion. If the
attributes of things are made too solid and
material in primitive thought, things them-
selves are too fluid and undefined, passing
^ Miss Harrison, Themis, p. 121.

lo ANIMISM

into each other by loose and easy identifica-
tions which prevent all clear and crisp distinc-
tions of thought. ^' In a word, primitive
thought has not yet evolved those distindlions
of substance and attribute, quality and rela-
tion, cause and efFedl, identity and difference,
which are the common property of civilized
thought. These categories which among us
every child soon comes to distinguish in
practice are for primitive thought interwoven
in wild confusion, and this confusion is the
intellectual basis of animism and of magic." '
The idea is expressed similarly by Aston:
"I would describe (primitive man's) mental
attitude as a piecemeal conception of the
universe as alive, just as he looks upon his
fellow man as alive without analyzing him into
the two distindl entities of body and soul."^"
The "piecemeal conception of the universe"
contains the idea that animistic man regards
other objedts in the world about him as being
on a parity of existence with himself in that
they are conceived as having sentient and
volitional life. He interprets all things in
terms of his own consciousness. On the

• Hobhouse, Morals In Evolution, ii. 20-21.
"• Shinto, p. 26.

ANIMISTIC STAGE OF CULTURE ii

other hand, praftically all the data in our
possession which bear upon the subjed indi-
cate that as far back as we can trace man,
he had already analyzed his kind into body
and soul. Even Neolithic man, and with
great probability also Palaeolithic man, had
the conception of a possessing or obsessing
spirit. The trepanning done by Neolithic
man during life is most easily explicable on
the theory that disease was caused by a spirit
which had obsessed the sick, and was to be
conjured forth only after an incision had been
made in the skull. The fadt that Kabyles
have been known within the memory of man
to perform this operation for this reason, and
that the modus operandi is in accord with
other methods among primitive races, can
lead at once to this conclusion. Up to 1888
there had been discovered in France in the
valley of the Torn over two hundred trepanned
skulls, in many cases among these the tre-
panning was ante mortem, with evident signs
of healing. And in the Wellcome Historical
Medical Museum in London there is a case
of flint instruments some of which almost
equal in sharpness of edge and point surgical
instruments of our own day, used, it is believed

12 ANIMISM

for this purpose." We shall find other reasons
for believing in the early discovery by man of
his own soul. Meanwhile to prove that is
not our purpose here. What we are concerned
with is man's outlook on the universe, his
, estimate of what we call nature.

"Man in that stage (i.e., the animistic)
may hold that a stone, a tree, a mountain, a
stream, a wild animal, a heavenly body, a
wind, an instrument of the hunt or of labor
or of domestic utility — indeed, any objedl
within the range of real or fancied existence
(and fancy looms large in this domain) —
possesses just such a soul as he conceives
himself to have, and that it is animated by
desires, moved by emotions, and empowered
by abilities parallel to those he perceives in
himself." 12

Testimonies to this facft might be adduced
from many quarters and illustrated in many
ways. Thus: "The African does not believe
in anything soulless, he even regards matter
itself as a form of soul, low because not lively." i'

" Cf. New York Medical Journal, Oft. 16, 1909, p. 71; i-

British Congregationalist, May 28, 1914; New Schaf-Herxog
Encyclopedia, iii. 193-194.

^ New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, iii. 194; cf. Bros La
Religion des peuples non-cimlises, chap. II.

" Miss Kingsley, West African Studies, p. 199.

ANIMISTIC STAGE OF CULTURE 13

Pere Lejeune says that the savages of New
France "se persuadent que non seulement
les hommes et les autres animaux, mais que
les autres choses sont animees." " E. S.
Hartland puts it this way: "Starting from
his personal consciousness, the savage attrib-

,utes the like consciousness to everything he
sees or feels around him."^^ And Reinach is

^equally emphatic:

"Animism gives a soul and a will to moun-
tains, rivers, rocks, trees, stones, the heavenly
bodies, the earth and sky. A tree, a post,
a pillar, the hollow of a rock, are the seat or
throne of invisible spirits. These spirits are
conceived and figured at a later stage under
animal form, and then under human form.
A spring was . . . Pegasus, Apollo's horse.
... A river is a bull with a human face. . . .
The laurel was Daphne, whom Apollo had
pursued; the oak was Zeus himself, before
being the tree of Zeus, and Dionysos was
supposed to live in the tree, after he had
ceased to be himself the tree. The earth was
Gzea, emerging from the soil in the shape of a
woman who implores the sky to water her.""

" Relations de la Nouvelle France, p. 199.

« Legend of Perseus, ii. 441. " Orpheus, p. 79.

14 ANIMISM

Thus, to give one final testimony, Im Thurn
says of the Indians of Guiana:

"It is absolutely necessary to premise here
that all tangible objedls, animate . . . and
inanimate alike, consist each of two separable
parts — a body and a spirit; and that these
are not only always readily separable invol-
untarily, as in death, and daily in sleep, but
are also, in certain individuals, always volun-
tarily separable.""

The preceding, then, affords a prima facie
basis for a tentative definition of animism,
the justification or demonstration of which
must wait for a later chapter. We assume
that "animism" stands for a stage of culture
in which man may regard any ohjeCl, real or
imaginary, as possessing emotional, volitional,
and actional potency like that he himself pos-
sesses. Things, of whatsoever sort, he may
consider the subjeAs of feehngs — likes and
dislikes, appetites or disinclinations, afFedtions
or antipathies, desires and longings; of will
— to help or injure, to adt or refrain from
adling; and of the power to ad according to
the promptings of these feelings and the
determinations of will.

" Im Thurn, Indians of Guiana, p. 329.

ANIMISTIC STAGE OF CULTURE 15

But — an imis m is thought . The enormous
signihcance ot these three words must not be
overlooked. They mark the difference be-
tween man and the whole creation beneath
him. The whole chain of adts implied in
the word under discussion involves mental
processes passing over into adlion with well
defined intention having their issue in the
future and being immeasurably removed from
instinft. It is true that we shall find this
thought at times pitifully infantile, paralleled
by the conceptions in some cases of four-year-
olds of the present;^* but it is still thought.
And we shall show that reason is on the throne.i
The outcome of this discussion will, it is be-
lieved, show the general logicality of primiti'^e
man's mental processes, once the basis from
which he starts is granted. The beliefs in
ghosts, spirits, gods, in transmigration and
metempsychosis, are not the chance hit or miss
conclusions of early man, but flow rationally
from the premise we have assumed. That

" The Chicago Tribune reports that "during a sudden thunder-
storm a little four-year-old came running into the Kindergarten,
crying as if her heart would break. When the Kindergartner
asked the cause of her trouble, she said, 'O Miss £., the sky
barked at me.'"

i6 ANIMISM

this reason is often aberrant in its premises,
that it is not seldom fitfully inconsequent,
may indeed appear. But what we find is
reason, thought at least of a kind, and in many
cases frightfully logical.

II

THE DISCOVERY OF THE SOUL

o

II

THE DISCOVERY OF THE SOUL
N THE hypothesis that the method of

man's creation was evolution, that he is
the finest produdt of nature's forces working in
continuous upward striving, how are we to
explain man's arrival at the realization of soul
or spirit, of something which is intelligently
and not merely instindlively diredtive of adlion ?
The possession of soul, in this sense, by even
the highest animals is disallowed by scientists ;
though recognition is growing that elements
that are acknowledged to belong to the in-
telle(5tual and even to the moral powers already
exist in brute psychology. Such elements are
shame or chagrin, and fear of what seems to
the animal what we might call the uncanny.
The writer remembers a s^ne in Meadville, Pa.,
where as reminiscences of a former iron foundry
there exist in some of the dooryards castings of
dogs. One day notice vnas attracted by a
street cur which had, stopped a few feet distant
from one of these caswton dogs. The cur was

19

20 ANIMISM

"pointing" at the image and wagging rapidly
his short tail in the manner of dogs intimating
friendly intentions towards another dog, and
desire for acquaintance with it. Seeing no
hostile demonstrations on the part of the ac-
quaintance-to-be, he went up to the iron
replica slowly, smelt of it, and at once dropped
his apology for a tail and made off with chagrin
plainly stamped in his entire demeanor. Mr.
Romanes tells of a trick on a pet dog that was
fond of playing with bones, which it would
worry and toss and growl at, evidently making
believe that they were alive. The owner tied
a thin but strong thread to the bone with which
it was one day playing, and after a little time,
when the dog had cast the bone some distance
away and was creeping up to it as to an objed
of prey, he began gently to pull the string.
The manner of the dog changed at once, first
evidently in surprise; then it continued to
crawl up to investigate. But as the bone con-
tinued to retreat, the dog finally withdrew and
hid under the furniture. ^ The animal evidently
recognized (i) that the bone was Ufeless, inert,
therefore (2) unendowed with power of motion.
But (3) this thing had moved, and fear (dread

^ Cited by Clodd, in Animism, pp. 22-23.

DISCOVERT OF TEE SOUL 21

of the unknown) entered evidently as the
result of a sort of rational process. It will be
noted that this case is to be differentiated
from those where fear enters as the result of
punishment, in which case the "fear" may be
only the result of association of ideas and the
formation of " instindtive " habit. There was
manifestation of chagrin in the first case
cited, for such was the clear impression
furnished when the animal looked back at
the witnesses of the scene as they burst into
laughter; and of fear in the second case,
since the animal showed what in a human
being we should call superstitious apprehen-
sion. There is therefore no adequate reason
for denying to primeval man a large degree of
rationality, growing in extension and intension
with enlarging experience and exercise. He
was no longer sheer animal. Of course, it
was by achievement of rationality, in however
small degree, that he became man. He was
no longer a mere observer — animals are
observant — but a thinker, who refledied and
reasoned, however faultily, upon his observa-
tions. The salient mark of his differentiation
from the animal lies in his recognition of
possession of this quality. Before this, re-r

22 ANIMISM

lapse into sheer animality was perhaps possible;
after it, such relapse is inconceivable. How
then did this come about?

The answer most in favor with anthropolo-
gists is that it began (i) with the phenomena
of sleep — (a) the evident difference between
that state and waking life, combined with
(b) the occurrence of dreams which often so
closely mimic or deal with the adtive and
conscious existence of the individual;^ and
(2) in the difference between the living and the
dead. It is to be recognized that (la) and
(2) are compared and combined in the logic
of the savage, and afford new ground for his
belief in something apart from and different
from the body which eventually becomes
known as soul. Through observation often
repeated, and through reasoning and refledlion
upon the fadts thus presented, man arrived
1 at the conclusion that he is himself a dual
(^being, possessing body and (what was even-
jtually recognized as) soul or spirit. Having
I arrived at this conclusion, he deduced from

* Cf. the dreams of Pharaoh's butler and of his baker as
narrated in Gen. 39; each of the individuals dreams of matters
conneifled with his specific duties.

DISCO FERT OF THE SOUL 23

experience and observation, or else jumped
to the conclusion, that other objects were
similarly constituted; he might attribute life,
soul, intention, and adion to each and every
objedt, to any objedt, that came under his
observation, no matter what its constitution.
It may be remarked, en passant, that the
dream life of man is separated from that of
animals probably only by the charadler of
the content of his dream, as it reproduces or
recomposes experiences registered in the (con-
scious or unconscious, subliminal) memory.
It is well known that some animals dream.
The twitching of the muscles or the whining
or even barking of a dog in sleep has often
been noticed, and is explicable best on the
hypothesis of a dream. If animals dream
and exhibit elements of consciousness, there
is every reason to carry back to a very early
period in human history the beginning of
the chain of thinking that, on the hypothesis
here presented, led to the conception of spirit
or soul as animating physical objedls.

How this could come about is abundantly
illustrated from the interpretations of dream
phenomena by primitive peoples. The dream
life of a savage being is conditioned by his

24 ANIMISM

waking existence, it mirrors more or less
perfecflly the life he leads. It is very probable
that the dreams of savages mimic even more
closely the waking existence than those of
man in a more advanced stage of culture.
The reason for this is that the primitive mode
of existence is less complex. Fewer elements
of interest go to make up life, and the course
of events is more uniform. Mr. F. Granger
remarks: "If yesterday was like the day
before, and is going to be repeated in a thou-
sand tomorrows, the dreams which echo the
life of the past will presage, with fair accuracy,
the life of the days to come. Add to all this
that the primitive mind distinguishes with
difl&culty {yfe should prefer to say, distin-
guishes not at alQ between what is real and
what is imagined {i.e., to the savage the dream
and the vision of the night are equally real
with the sights and experiences of his waking
hoursj and we can understand why the dream
existence is often placed on a level with that
of waking hours.^ Lying down to rest, the
savage dreams of the chase or of the search
for vegetable food. On awaking he tells his

» Worship of the Romans, pp. 28-29; cf. Fiske, Myths and
Myth-makers, p. 18.

DISCOVERY OF TEE SOUL 25

companions that he has been away on a hunt
or the Uke, and relates the adventures through
which he beheves he has passed. But his
companions assure him that his body has
been with them all the time, and both he and
they naturally deduce a dual existence — an
invisible soul, usually inhabiting but on occa-
sion leaving a visible body.* Here then is
one almost certain source of the idea of soul.
How conclusive such reasoning is to the
primitive mind, how firmly the savage believes
in the dream as consisting of adlual experience,
may be seen in the comparatively exhaustive
collection of cases by Dr. J. G. Frazer.^ Thus
an Indian dreamed that at his master's orders
he had (during the night) hauled a canoe up
a series of rapids, and next morning reproached
the master for making him work so hard in
the hours appropriated to rest.® To this
savage the dream was real and the toil ex-
hausting. Of the adluality of the belief in
the absence of the soul during sleep there is
abundant evidence. Numerous peoples in a

* Cf. Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, ii. 122,
135-136. Gomes, Seventeen Years among the Sea Dyaks of
Borneo, p. 177.

' Taboo, chap. V.

' lb., pp. 36, 37; cf. Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, p. 161.

26 ANIMISM

lowly stage of culture use caution in awaking
a sleeper. It is held that his soul is away,
and that he must be aroused gradually so
that the soul may have time to return; the
same reasoning applies to infants.'' Melane-
sians explain the phenomena of a fainting fit
in the same way, holding that such cases
indicate premature death, but that the soul
was not yet wanted in the spirit world and
so was sent back to earth.*

A diiFerent source of the idea of soul is
found in the phenomena of death, powerfully
reenforcing the deductions made from sleep
and dreams. While in the one case there
was seen the inertness of the body, perhaps
with breathing hardly perceptible, which yet
was experiencing dreams that were interpreted
as the adlivity of the absent soul; in the
other there was noted the expiring breath and
the subsequent inertness of the body, only
more pronounced than in sleep, passing into
rigidity and finally into decay. Adlion had
ceased with that last exhalation. If in sleep
the dream was interpreted as absence of

' Frazer, Taboo, pp. 39-42; Roscoe, The Baganda, p. 18;
Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 189 ff.
' Brown, Melanesians, pp. 192 ff.

DISCOVERT OF THE SOUL 27

soul, much more applicable would that inter-
pretation seem when the bystanders had
noted the last breath and the (consequent)
absence of motion, action, speech, life. Some-
thing had gone away with the last sigh,
something unseen, the absence of which
brought about a great change. That man
lying there — companion, husband, father,
brother, friend — used to live and move and
talk and breathe. He was wont to respond
to call and to readl to the various stimuli
about him. Now calls were unheard, appeals
brought no reply, promptings met no response.
And the difference was brought about (so men
reasoned) by the absence of that which had
issued forth unseen, never to return, at least
to its former home, as survivors would observe.

But the full consequences of observance of
the phenomena of death in the diredlion under
investigation are not seen till we take into
account certain other phases of human falli-
bility. Particularly is it necessary to note
primitive man's relatively smaller experience
and confused perceptions, and the aberrant
conclusions often drawn from these.'

Most men are and always have been defi-

' Granger, Worship of the Romans, pp. 28-29.

28 ANIMISM

cient in power both of observation and of
dedudion. (i) They assume as real many
things that do not exist, events that do not
occur, and relations that have no reaUty.
Illustrations are found in the belief in the
existence of a directive power in the objedl
picked up by the fetish worshiper, the super-
stition of the Celt that a fairy has left in the
place of his own baby a fairy changeling,^" and
the belief in the descent of a human gens
from, e.g., eagle, fox, or snake, as in totemism.
Similarly boys of Mafulu, New Guinea, while
making a drum must drink only what is
found in axils of certain plants, else the
embers which are to hollow out their drums
will not burn — drinking any other water
will put it out, or certain other restridlions
are felt to be necessary.'^ (2) They take
obvious fadts and interpret them wrongly.
Thus in the mediaeval ordeal of the sacrament
(a late example chosen only because of its
familiarity, but exemplifying perfedtly earlier
conditions; the phenomena can be parallelled
in any quarter of the world and every grade
of culture) the sacramental wafer was employed

"• Rhys, Celtic Folk-lore, p. 102.

^ Williamson, South Sea Savage, pp. 258-259.

DISCOVERT OF THE SOUL 29

as a proof of innocence or guilt. Constridtion
of the throat and inability to swallow was
often the result of the administration of the
wafer. If it did not result, deity was held to
have shown the innocence of the accused; if it
did, guilt was declared manifest. How really
irrelative this test was to the fadls is shown by
the frequent experience of inability to swallow
a medicinal pill or tablet without the aid of a
liquid to "wash it down." Yet here is no
question of innocence or guilt. The explana-
tion is that attention to the aft of swallowing
(which is usually effortless and automatic)
causes effort and so constrid:ion. Swallowing
in the ordeal was doubtless sometimes im-
possible just for the reason given here; but
deity did liot intervene, guilt or innocence
was not necessarily revealed by this fadl, nor
did inability to swallow necessarily result
from guilt — the innocent might also find
the task difficult simply because of the atten-
tion dire<5ted to it.

On the difference in resped of observational
and reasoning power of savage and highly
civilized man let Grant Allen speak.

"To us the conception of human life as a
relatively short period, bounded by a known

30 ANIMISM

duration, and naturally terminated at a fixed
end, is a common and familiar one. We
forget, however, that to the savage this is
quite otherwise. He lives in a small and
scattered community, where deaths are rare,
and where natural death is comparatively
infrequent. Most of his people are killed in
war, or devoured by wild beasts, or destroyed
by accident in the chase, or by thirst or
starvation. Some are drowned in rapid rivers;
some crushed by falling trees or stones; some
poisoned by deadly fruits, or bitten by veno-
mous snakes; some massacred by chiefs or
murdered in quarrels with their own tribesmen.
In a large majority of instances there is some
open and obvious cause of death, and this
cause is generally due either to the hand of
man or to some other animal; or failing that,
to some apparently aftive effort of external
nature, such as flood or lightning or forest
fires or landslip or earthquake." "

Man recognized his own volitional agency
in causing death in the chase or in personal
conflids. So to each of the agencies which
had produced disaster he attributed powers
like his own — the volitional behind the

, , , ^ Evolution of the Idea of God, pp. 44-45.

DISCOVERT OF THE SOUL 31

physical. He had, perhaps, himself narrowly
escaped the fate he had seen befall others and
ascribed his escape to his own cleverness.
But not all of his acquaintances had suffered
what we should call a violent death. Some
had passed away in disease or even in old age.
Surely it was evident, one would say, that no
external cause was at work there. But that
was not his way of thinking. He knew of
unseen powers that send or are the wind,
the storm, the lightning.^' And so the body
that was racked with pain and eventually
became inert in death was held to be tortured
by an invisible something. In many cases,
he knew, death resulted from external violence;
in all cases, he reasoned, the great change
was wrought by powers external to the victim,
which sometimes worked with invisible
weapons.^*

Bearing in mind, then, the faulty observation
and logic of primitives, and connedling the
two sources of the idea of soul previously
discussed, viz. (i) sleep and dreams, and
(2) the phenomenon of death, together with

" The Ekoi of South Africa regard thunder as a giant who
strides across the heavens, while lightning is either his servant
or his enemy. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, p. 73.

" See chapter IX for cases of disbelief in natural death.

32 ANIMISM

(3) the inference therefrom of a something
that leaves the body either temporarily in
sleep or permanently in death, we are brought
to notice next what apparently corroborated
the evidence (as it would seem) respedling
the existence of soul, that is, the appearance
in dreams of those who had died. This was
in all probability a more frequent occurrence
with early than with modern man, because
of the smaller content of his experience and
the consequent more frequent repetition of
its elements. We have already remarked
that the distindtion between reality and fancy,
fadl and the merely apparent, is often missed
in early cultural stages. It was quite in
accordance with natural logic to reason that
the apparition in the dream was real. The
dead, therefore, still lived, had been seen,
and had possibly engaged in conversation.
The wandering spirit of the dreamer had met
the disembodied spirit; or the latter had
visited his former friends while they slept."
The tremendous consequences flowing from
these beliefs will be developed a little later.

By these various experiences, dovetailing
and appearing to force a conclusion, man

" Lang, The Making of Religion, pp. 54 ff.

DISCOVERT OF THE SOUL 33

certainly in a very primitive stage of culture
drew the inference that he was a duahty —
the body which he could see and feel, and a
something of which in his conscious existence
he knew nothing except that it existed. More-
over, it is demonstrable that among many
primitive peoples the priority in importance
is assigned to the spirit. Thus of the New
Guineans it is afl&rmed: "These and other
things ^specified in the context] seem to show
that a sharp distindlion is drawn between
body and spirit by the natives. Certainly
the body gains from long associations virtues
from the indwelling spirit; but it is the spirit
which is the real man, higher than, and
superior to, the body in which the spirit
dwells." i«

One can not go far astray if he maintain
that it was the discovery of the soul which
was the most momentous in the history of
the human race; to it must be traced all
man's uplift in the millenniums of his existence.
" Newton, In Far New Guinea, p. 194.

Ill

THE SOUL'S NATURE

Ill

THE SOUL'S NATURE

\ N important inquiry meets us at this
■^^*- point: How did man think of this
second something that usually inhabited his
body but sometimes left it for a time and at
death left it permanently? For it would
soon have been borne in upon him (even though
he did not consciously recognize the soul's
presence and operations) that the permanent
absence of soul meant death, and that there-
fore while he lived it was present. What did
he think concerning the nature of this all-
important part of him? It is very clear from
a number of circumstances that the notion of
the soul was governed by the phenomenon
of death. Decisive upon this point is the
wonderful accord of meaning in so many
languages of the word which expresses this
inner elusive reality. In the developed lan-
guages we may note the root idea of such
words as the Latin spiritus, anima, animus,

37

^

38 ANIMISM

Irish anam, Sanskrit atman, Greek psyche,
pneuma, thumos, German Geist, Dutch geest,
English ghost, Hebrew nephesh, ruab, Sumerian
zid, Babylonian napishtu, Egyptian kneph,
all of which go back to the notion of breath,
or of a gentle movement of air or wind. One
may forage at large and observe the same
root notion and a similar usage in many other
different regions, discovering the Australian
wang, Mohawk atonritz, Californian-Oregonian
wkrisha, pints, Dakotan niya, Javanese nawa,
Aztec ehecatl, Nicaraguan julio, Gypsy duk,
and Finnish far. This line of thought is
fortified by the conception of the insubstan-
tiality of the soul, expressed in such words
as skia, umbra, and "shade," used to denote
the disembodied spirit. Terms of similar
content were used not only by the cultured
Greeks and Romans, but are known to be
employed among North American Indians,
Zulus and Basutos in Africa, among the Cala-
bars, and elsewhere. One recalls the Hebrew
rephaim. The survival of the belief in the
insubstantiahty of the disembodied spirit till
the Middle Ages is shown by Dante, for
according to him the souls in purgatory knew
that the poet had not passed through death

THE SOUL'S NATURE 39

by the fadt that his figure cast a shadow.
Indeed, the idea of communication by a
disembodied spirit with the Hving in dreams
was entrenched by the refledion that its very
immateriality enabled it to hold communica-
tion with sleeping persons without arousing
them from sleep.

How early man came to realize that this
part which is designated by breath or pufF of
air is his real self is impossible to say. But
what is significant is that in many languages
the word meaning spirit, life, or breath has
also the connotation "self," as has, e.g., the
Hebrew nephesh. And how natural such a
signification is can be illustrated by the
concrete fad that Laura Bridgman, the blind-
deaf-mute, is said to have expressed the
thought of death in a dream by the statement
that "God took away my breath to heaven."
Among the Ekoi of Nigeria ghost and soul and
breath are conneded as phases of the same
thing or as equivalents. One must not forget
that the phenomenon of death which is most
obvious is the expiring sigh or last breath,
after the departure of which life ceases to
exist. What more natural than that the
breath thus finally exhaled should be associated

40 ANIMISM

with the soul or spirit, or, as in some cases,
be thought to carry the soul with it? Since
in dreams a person deceased has been seen
and addressed while the body was known to
have dissolved, the way is diredl and the step
short to the conclusion that the self, the real
person, is that same breath or soul.^

But did primitive peoples endow the soul
with form ? The testimony to this is abundant
and cogent.^ The most natural and perhaps
most common idea of the soul's shape is that
it is a miniature of the possessor's form.
Among those who have held this belief are
American Indians such as the, Hurons, the
natives of British Columbia, Alaska, and the
Esquimaux of the districts adjacent to Behring
Straits, islanders such as the Niassians near
Sumatra and the Fijians, and continental
dwellers such as the Malays and West Africans.
To give a single example, Nigerian Etoi
believe that "when a man's body decays a
new form comes out of it, in every way like
the man himself when he was above ground." '

' Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, p. 230.

^ It has been colledled not only by Tylor in his Primitive
Culture, but also by Frazer, Taboo, chap. II.

' Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 17, 230; cf. Frazer,
Taboo, p. 39.

THE SOUL'S NATURE 41

For the Egyptians abundant testimony is
available as to the belief in the double, existing
indeed fronti birth.* There is a picture in the
Roman catacombs portraying the death of a
Christian, in which the soul is represented as
leaving the mouth of the dying in a cloud-like
shape that takes his own form. What is
pradlically a replica of this is found on the
walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa; and in
the east transept of Salisbury Cathedral on
the sculptured monument over the tomb of
Bishop Giles de Bridgport the soul appears
as a naked figure carried by an angel.^ The
usual notion is that the soul is invisible. But
as in other respedls shamans or medicine men
are credited with extraordinary powers, so
they are supposed to be able to discern the
spirits or souls moving about or endeavoring
to escape from the body. Sometimes the
organ of detedlion is the ear, which can note
the motion of the soul's wings. Or, the soul
being of human shape, it leaves faint foot-
marks as indications of its presence, and light

^ A notable case among many is the bas-relief in the temple
at Luxor, exhibiting the presentation at birth to Ra of the royal
child Amenhotep III and his double. Cf. Budge, Osiris, etc.,
p. 119. 1

^ Clodd, Animism, p. 40.

42 ANIMISM

ashes strewn on the ground may betray its
presence to the keen-sighted medicine man.

Mention has been made of the return of the
soul of one deceased to the haunts of the body
as evidenced by dreams. The form appearing
in the dream was recognized as that of a
friend, again testifying to the assumed fad
that the soul has the shape of the body.
Further testimony to this belief is found in
the faith that the soul is held to suflFer in
some degree the fate of the body. Brazilian
Indians, for example, believe that the soul
arrives in the other world hacked and torn,
or uninjured, exadlly as was the condition of
the body at death.^ Australians tie together
the toes and bind together the thumbs behind
the back, or mutilate the body and fill it with
stones, or, again, they lop off the thumb of a
slain enemy, that the ghost may not hurl
shadowy spear or pull the bowstring in the
land of spirits.'' Chinese and Africans abhor
mutilation, especially decapitation, as a punish-
ment, for the latter produces headless ghosts.*
And Shakespeare makes Macbeth cry out:

• Im Thurn, Among the Indians of Guiana, passim.

' Cases of the kind are cited in Frazer, The Dying God,
pp. lo-li; and Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 449, 474.

• Cf. Roscoe, The Baganda, pp. 281-282.

THE SOUL'S NATURE 43

"Shake not thy gory locks at me." The
ghost retains the bloody form in which the
body was left at its departure. From classical
Greece and Rome the evidence for this same
idea of the soul's form is abundant and cogent;
and it would not be difficult to show, since
so much has been revealed in the frescoes and
vase paintings recovered in the Mediterranean
region, that this idea comes down from very
primitive times. In the paintings which repre-
sent Hermes Psychopompus directing the issue
and return of souls, the latter are figured as
winged mannikins, coming from or returning
to burial jars.^ The form of Patroklos' shade
was that of the living hero.^"

A notion closely akin to the foregoing is
that which connedts the soul with the shadow.
While many curious ideas which gather around
the latter — such as the Brahman belief that
the shadow of a pariah falling on food defiles
it — do not involve the identity of the two,
in many cases there can be little doubt that
soul and shadow are not only closely related
but are regarded as identical. Some believe
that an assault upon the shadow may be fatal

' Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 43, and Themis, p. 205.
» Iliad, xxiii. 65 ff.

44 ANIMISM

to its possessor, or at least extremely harmful.
The Indians of the lower Frazer River hold
that man has four souls, of which one is the
shadow. The Euahlayi of Australia believe
that man has a dream spirit, a shadow spirit,
perhaps an animal spirit, and one that leaves
only at death." Other Australians consider
that each individual has a choi, a sort of
disembodied soul, and a ngai, which lives in
the heart. The choi awaits reincarnation
after death, the ngai passes immediately after
death into the children of the deceased. It is
the latter that sometimes leaves a person
temporarily in his lifetime, e.g., when he
faints. The choi has some sort of vague
relationship with the shadow.^^ The Kai of
New Guinea also believe that man has two
souls," as do some of the Fijians, one of these
being light (as a refledlion in the water), the
other dark, hke the shadow." Dyaks assert
the possession of three or even of seven,
souls; one may leave the body tempor-
arily, the man dies only when all leave."

" Mrs. Parker, Euahlayi Tribe, p. 35.
^ Frazer, Belief in Immortality, i. 129.
" Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 112.
" Williams, Fiji, i. 242.

" Gomes, Sea Dyaks 0} Borneo, p. 177; cf. Hastings, ERE, vi
226.

THE SOUL'S NATURE 45

Gilyaks may have three souls. The Balong
of the Cameroon think that one may have
several souls, one in his own body and others
in different animals. The death of one of
these animals, say, at the hand of a hunter
causes the man's death.^^ The equivalence of
the shadow to the man himself is proved by
its use (or that of its dimensions, in a later
stage of culture) in the same manner as the
body in foundation sacrifice — to give stability
to the structure. After an exadlly similar
manner of thought the reflexion of a body in
water or a mirror is regarded as the soul.
Injury to reflection or shadow may result in
injury to the corresponding member of the
body. Among the Congo people shadow or
picture or refledtion is the equivalent of soul.^^
This whole manner of thought explains why
in so many regions the natives do not willingly
submit to being photographed or represented
on canvas.^^

While the usual mode of thought represents

" Globus, Ixix (1896), 277, cited in Hastings, ERE, iv. 412-
413.

" Weeks, Among Congo Cannibals, p. 162; cf. Talbot, In the
Shadow of the Bush, p. 230.

18 Cases cited in Frazer, Golden Bough, Part II; Taboo, ii.
77-100.

46 ANIMISM

the human soul as a mannikin, other ideas
are found. Among the ancient Egyptians,
in Brazil, in Melanesia, in Bohemia, Malaysia,
Java, Sumatra, Borneo, and elsewhere the
shape of the spirit may be that of a bird;"
in British Columbia the bird is enclosed in an
egg in the nape of the neck. Or the soul may
take the form of a mouse (Brunswick, Tran-
sylvania, Swabia, Saxony), which may differ
in color in different regions; or of a fly (Tran-
sylvania), a Hzard (India), or an indistindt
cloudy form (Scotland ).^ Greeks and Serbs
thought of the soul also as a butterfly, and
the Greek name for one species of this insed
is Psyche.

As to the constitution of this part of
man's duality there is a wide consensus along
the lines already indicated. Primitive peoples
throughout the world describe it as a vapor,
a shadowy, filmy substance, related to the
body as the perfume to the flower. It is pale
and yielding to the touch, without flesh and
bone, thin, impalpable, discerned as the figure
in the human eye. Its movements may be

" Bros, La Religion des peuples non-civilises, p. 54.

" Miller, My Schools and Schoolmasters, pp. 106-107, cited by
Frazer, Taboo, pp. 40-41; Brown, Melanesians, pp. 141 ff ._ here
bird, rat, lizard, etc., are forms the soul takes.

THE SOUL'S NATURE 47

as swift as the wind, and so it is sometimes
regarded as winged. Yet it has a certain
materiaUty, and consequently has necessities.
After death, for instance, it needs nourishment
and partakes of the spirit, the essential part,
of the material things sometimes provided
for it. Egyptians, carrying the idea still
further, provided pictures or models of food,
furniture, and the like, which in a similar way
became available to the spirit. The semi-
materiality of the soul is illustrated by the
fadt of the return to his temple being known
by marks alleged to be found in maize flour
strewed on the threshold of his temple-
pyramid."

" Spence, Cmlization oj Ancient Mexico, p. 47.

IV

THE EXTERNAL OR SEPARABLE
SOUL

IV

THE EXTERNAL OR SEPARABLE
SOUL

TF what precedes be accepted, it can be
-*- taken as established that primitive man,
or at least man in an early stage of culture,
determined himself to be a duality, soul and
body. But the two constituents did not
appear to be inseparably conneded. The
soul might leave the body, either temporarily
or permanently, and in the latter case the
body perished. The presence of the soul is
therefore essential to life. But incidentally
reference has been made to the absence of
the soul for periods usually brief. In fadl,
primitive races hold that the soul absents
itself voluntarily at times, goes on travels,
performs tasks, and the like; and also that
some have the power to send forth the soul —
their own or others' — for their own purposes.
It may even happen that the soul is either
lured forth or departs unwisely, and has to
return. In New Guinea when a person faints.

52 ANIMISM

he is said to be dead; and when he revives,
the explanation is that he "died green," and
perhaps because the soul was not wanted in
the spirit land, it had to take up again its old
life with the body.^ For the wandering of
the soul in dreams there is abundant testi-
mony, — so abundant, in fadl, that we will
content ourselves with a single reference.^
The Japanese are persuaded that this same
constituent of personality leaves the body
that it may sport itself untrammelled.^ The
satirist Lucian and the scientist Pliny relate
the story of the seer Hermotimus, who sent
forth his spirit to explore distant regions.
At last, during an unwontedly long absence,
his wife supposed him to be dead and burned
his body, so that on its return the spirit
found no dwelling for itself.* A slightly
different case is that reported of the Scandina-
vian chief Ingimund, who shut up three Finns
that their spirits might visit Iceland, discover
the He of the land where he proposed to settle,
and report to him on their return. An in-

' Newton, In Far New Guinea, p. 220.
' Kingsley, West African Studies, pp. 2CX3 ff.
' Griffis, Mikado's Empire, p. 472.

* Cited by Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 439; cf. Jevons, Intro-
dvdion, pp. 44 ST., and the cases there cited.

THE EXTERNAL SOUL 53

stance like that of Hermotimus is the case
of Epimenides, the Cretan prophet and magi-
cian, who was reputed to be able to dispatch
his spirit in quest of knowledge and recall it
at will.^ And Hermotimus had in recent
years an African disciple, whose exploits were
worthy, if reports are to be credited, of his
unknown master.®

Since belief in the absence of the soul, at
least for a temporary period, could be held
over so wide an area and even among com-
paratively developed peoples, it is not sur-
prising that there should arise a belief in the
existence of the animating spirit seated not
in the body, but in some place where security
would be greater. The evidences are many
of a belief that the soul might reside either
from birth or from some later period in some
objedl other than its normal home. This is
the phenomenon known to anthropologists as
the "external" or "separable" soul. A dilu-
tion of this is the form which is christened " the
life token," in which the clouding of a liquid
or the tarnishing of a weapon is the sign
either of danger, sickness, or death of the

^ Hesychius, Lexikon, under "Epimenides."
s Talbot, In the Shadoui oj the Bush, p. 23 1.

54 ANIMISM

person for whom the liquid or objedl stands.
It can be shown, however, in most cases, that
when the Hfe token is the center of the story,
it is the result of an advanced stage of culture,
if it is not diredtly stated that such obje<ft is
the residence of the soul.

The earliest example of this belief so far
known to literature occurs in the Egyptian
tale of "Anpu and Bata, or the Two
Brothers." ^ The younger brother commits
his soul apparently to the keeping successively
of acacia flowers, of a bull, and then of two
trees, while a chip from one of the latter
causes conception. Another view of the latter
experiences, however, is that they are cases
of transmigration. The case of the B along of
the Cameroons who believe that a man may
have several souls, one in his own body and
others in different animals of the jungle, has
already been cited. It is quite usual for
them to account for a man's sudden death
by supposing that one of his soul-containing
animals has been killed by a hunter.* Fre-
quent in folk-lore is the theme of the wicked
and oppressive ogre or giant or wizard who

' Petrie, Egyptian Tales, 2d series, pp. 48 ff.

« Globus, 69 (1896), 277, cited in Hastings, ERE, 4, 412-413,

THE EXTERNAL SOUL 55

holds in his power maiden or youth, and is
invincible to ordinary attack because his soul
is safe-guarded in an egg inside a duck that
swims on a pond in a distant island guarded
by a dragon within a walled and inaccessible
fortress. Not until the many obstacles have
been overcome and the egg obtained is the
luckless maiden or youth released by the
crushing of the egg and the consequent im-
mediate demise of ogre, giant, or wizard.
This theme of a receptacle strongly guarded
(though in this case it is not a soul, but the
"Book of Thoth," a book of magic) comes,
curiously enough, in its earliest form from
Egypt, and suggests that this idea of an
objeift, and perhaps the separable soul, secured
by many safeguards, may have been a particu-
larly widely diffused idea. The "Book of
Thoth" was in an iron box, which enclosed
successively one of bronze, of kete-wood, of
ivory and ebony, of silver, and last of gold,
the entire nest being in the middle of the river,
surrounded by snakes, scorpions, and "all
manner of creeping things," and above all by
a snake that no man could kill — which how-
ever a man did kill. In this case, as in most
of those in folk-lore where the soul is sup-

S6 ANIMISM

posedly unassailable, the conquest is effedled
through magic'

In many cases the story has to do with the
miraculous birth (not always virgin birth,
however) of twins or triplets, simultaneous
witfi which appears some plant or tree or
other object which is the repository of the
soul or is the "life-token." The fading or
withering of bloom or plant here indicates
disaster. Sometimes, instead of the plants,
weapons (which undergo modernization in
successive generations of story-tellers) spring
up, or a spring wells forth, and in them reside
the souls of the children. Then if hilt falls
from sword or sheen tarnishes on blade, or if
lock looses from gun or the clear water of the
spring begins to run clouded, the event be-
tokens danger or catastrophe to the possessor
of the soul.^" In the Ramayana, Garuda says
to Rama: "I am thy friend, thy life free-

' The story of the Book of Thoth is told in Petrie, Egyptian
Tales, ii. 89 ff.; Spiegelberg, Demotische Papyrus; and Murray,
Ancient Egyptian Legends, pp. 31 ff.

•" A number of interesting cases exhibiting these phenomena,
not usually cited in the books can be found in Parker, Village
Folk Tales of Ceylon (e.g., i. 164, 166-168, 190, et passim); Day,
Folk-Tales of Bengal, pp. 2, 6, 85-86, 189, 253, etc.; Indian
Antiquary, i. 86, 117, xvii. 54; Steel, Tales of the Punjab, pp. 52,
55, 75, etc/

THE EXTERNAL SOUL 57

ranging, external to thyself." " It may be
sufficient here, without going further into
details in this interesting subjed:, to note that
a considerable number of folk-tales of this
and kindred types have been brought together
and their points of similarity and difference
discussed in Hartland's fascinating volumes,^^
a work which is urged upon all who wish to
note the salient charadleristics of this fertile
field. It is interesting to remark that a new
area for the existence of this curious belief
has recently been discovered in the far north,
since it is a part of the mental possessions of
the Tshimsheans of Alaska.^'

If it be objedled that the principal evidence
for all this is found in the region of Mdrchen,
of folk-tale, and therefore purely imaginative,
the reply is: even were this all, it shows a
mode of thought and possibilities of concep-
tion, of psychological adlivity. But above all
this, we can adduce the fadt that transition to
actual belief is furnished by the many cases
in which a tree is planted when a child is
born, and the life of tree and child are thought

" Nivedita, Myths of Hindus, p. 82.

^ The Legend of Perseus, 3 vols.

" Arftander, Apostle of Alaska, p. 93.

S8 ANIMISM

to be intimately connected. The Maori bury
the navel cord or the placenta and plant a
tree over the spot, and the latter becomes
the life token.^* Similarly, in Old Calibar the
burial of the placenta and planting of a tree
are conjoined.^^ In Pomerania a tree already
growing is employed. Similar beliefs may be
cited from Western Africa, Oceanica (e.g.,
Banks Islands ^^), Madagascar, Russia, Ger-
many, Italy, Switzerland, and England, and
even in China traces of like customs are
found." In these cases fate of tree and person
are so bound together that withering of or
damage to the tree results in or indicates
harm to the person. Thus certain Nigerian
tribes hold that a tree has the Ufe or breath
of a person in it, and that harm to either may
mean death to the other.^*

" Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, p. 184.

" Burton, Wit and Wisdom from West Africa, p. 411.

^ Rivers, Melanesian Society, i. 155.

" Cases are collefted in Hartland, Legend 0/ Perseus, ii. 28 S.

" Thomas, Anthropological Report, pp. 29, 31, et passim.

V
PARITY OF BEING

PARITY OF BEING

' I ^HIS opens the way to the next branch
-*- of the subjeA. If the human soul could
reside in objedts, why should not these objedls
themselves possess spirits? The evident con-
vidlion of early and primitive races as to the
existence, form, and substance of the human
soul has, it is believed, been adequately
presented in the foregoing. But is the posses-
sion of soul limited by these races to humanity?
Do primitive peoples regard other beings as
also so endowed? The definition of animism
already furnished involves an affirmative an-
swer, but we must look a little further into
this phase of the subjedt. There is an "epi-
gram of Christian pantheism" which declares
that "God sleeps in the stone, dreams in the
plant, awakens in the animal, and is self-
conscious in man." ^ This expresses in some

1 Basil Wilberforce, Steps in Spiritual Growth, v. 50.
61

62 ANIMISM

degree what primitive man thought of things
about him, except that he would have de-
murred at the idea of mere sleep or dream of
the sentient in the world of the non-human.
He doubtless from the beginning made himself
the measure of things. And so, as was briefly
shown at the beginning of this discussion,^
any objedl in nature might be conceived by
primitive or savage as a duality, like himself,
the body of which was visible and tangible,
and the soul, like his own, invisible except to
the soul itself or to the skilled shaman. With
the untutored, nothing exists in nature but
may give occasion to this conception of
possession of soul. Omaha Indians represent
this by the statement that all forms mark
where Wakonda has stopped and brought
them into existence. "Man . . . becomes lit-
erally a part of nature, connected with it
physically and related to it psychically." So
endowments of animals may be transferred to
man, and Wakonda helps in answer to prayer
by sending the animal which has the endow-
ment proper to the end desired. This explains
in part the "animal totem," found in almost
exadtly parallel form among the Tamaniu of

* Pp. 10 ff., above.

PARITY OF BEING 63

the Banks Islands.* Another statement of the
fadt is the following:

"The quality of savage mind which perhaps
most profoundly illuminates our subjedt is its
hazy sense of personality, the diflSculty it ex-
periences in marking off its 'self from other
selves; in other words, the absence of sharp
dualisms. This is revealed in creation myths,
in primitive notions of kinship and relation-
ship, in the almost universal savage belief in
metamorphosis, in the savage's identification
of 'self with the name, shadow, dream-self,
likeness, clothing and other property. . . . And
the wide-spread belief in 'possession' by good
or evil spirits further confirms the principle."*

More advanced peoples may own to a com-
plete animism. Examples are found in the
advanced philosophies and religions of India.
"Only last summer in a conversation with an
orthodox Brahman in Kashmir I discovered
that he regarded everything in nature, down
to separate stick and stone and blade of

' A. C. Fletcher and F. La Flesche, in Twenty-seventh Annual
Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, p. 600; Rivers,
Melanesian Society, i. 154.

* Todd, The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency,
pp. 9-10.

64 ANIMISM

grass, as possessed by its own spirit." ^ It is
not wonderful that man should endow with
life, soul, and power the great objedts of nature,
the heavenly bodies, for instance. Nor can
we wonder that such objedts as a volcano with
its manifestation of mysterious force, a moun-
tain range which seems to clothe itself in
clouds and to launch forth the avalanche, the
sea, with its varied moods and mystery, that
appals even the modern experienced traveler,
the river with its ceaseless flow and its occa-
sional devastations, the forest with its reaches
of silence or its monotone under the soughing
of the wind, call up convidlions of dread
personaHty. These things alone sufllice to
suggest that primitive man felt himself ever
in the presence of mystery. Few objedls
there were but seemed to possess each its own
basis for arousing admiration or fear.

It is necessary here to inquire somewhat
more minutely into the drift of the thoughts
of primitive man concerning the things he
saw or felt or imagined. And in doing this
we are to recall that three avenues are open
along which to advance in this inquiry. First

5 Professor Hervey D. Griswold, in The Biblical World,
Sept. 1912, p. 165.

PARirr OF BEING 65

there is the avenue of cult, where definite
afts of devotion or gift (sacrifice) unfaiHngly
indicate behef in the sentient and potent
capabiUties of the objedl addressed. It is
obvious that even the most naive of savages
pay no attention of this sort to objedls which
they conceive to be without the quaUties of
life, sensation, emotion, and power. The
second avenue is that of folk-lore and myth-
ology. To some this may appear trivial and
unworthy of serious attention. Yet these
are "the sedimentary deposits of the traditions
of remotely distant epochs." ^ Just as chil-
dren's games and festivals in May or in
harvest season recall and are founded on
pradtices that once obtained in real earnest,
so folk-tales encyst, like a fly in the amber
or a fossil in the rock, the indications of life
in some cases long past. In other instances
not a few they represent thought that still
lingers, if we but knew where to look for it.
Stories of men and women transformed into
beasts, either voluntarily or involuntarily,
of cats or hares which prove to be the forms
witches assume for mischievous ends, seem
to us foolish; the tales of were-wolves, told in
' Q>x, IntTodudion to Folk-lore, pp. 3-4.

66 ANIMISM

earnest even yet in parts of Europe, seem to
the educated impossible and merely laughable.
Yet we shall see that the modern African
believes them, and at times looks askance at
his neighbor who has the reputation of being
an "elephant-man" or a "leopard-man." The
third avenue is that of beliefs still or recently
current among savages comparatively or com-
pletely unafFedted by the higher civilizations.
Even in India, which has so long been in
contadl with the culture of the West, old
beUefs linger, often in passive but effedive
resistance to more enlightened ideas, while
in Africa and among the indigenes of the
Americas and of AustraHa and Oceanica native
forms of thought continue, sometimes but
little adulterated, as where relationship is
claimed by a clan or tribe with this or that
genus of plant or animal life.

I. INANIMATE OBJECTS IN NATURE
POSSESS SOUL

It seems superfluous here to cite cases of
the behef which has existed so nearly uni-
versally that the sun, the planets, and the
stars are living objeAs possessed of soul.

PARITY OF BEING 67

The stage in which a deity is supposed to
inhabit or to rule or to have as his special
sphere of control one of these heavenly objeds
registers, of course, an advanced culture,
when pure animism has given way to a higher
mode of thought and a truer perception of
faAsJ But that once these objedls were
regarded as sentient is clear from poetry,
myth, and remainder in folk-lore and song.
Among Oceanicans the sun is in form like a
man, but possessed of fearful energy. He
has many legs, and various other members in
excess.* Worthy of special notice in this
connexion is the conception of the earth as
the great mother, a belief that was historical
in Babylonia, Asia Minor particularly, and in
Greece, where it influenced in especial manner
practice and ritual. Speaking of the Su-
merians Langdon says:

"The nourishing life of earth, warmed by
the sunshine, refreshed by the rains, furnished

' On Zeus as an example of this, see Cook's Zeus, p. 3, note 2.

' Westervelt, Legends of Maui, pp. 50, $2. For a coUedlion
of indications of worship of the sun (itself proof of the way in
which this luminary was regarded), see the author's article in
The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge,
xi. 137-145; for stai-worship, ib., xi. 68-69; 2i"J for worship of
the moon among the Hebrews, ib., vii. 492-494.

68 ANIMISM

the prehistoric Sumerians . . . with their first
god. And this deity who fostered all life
was conceived of as a mother, unbegotten,
genderless, producing animal and vegetable
life as a virgin. But primitive peoples do not
think in abstradl terms, nor do they produce
ideas as abstradl principles. They conceived
the earth goddess under that form of life with
which they were most familiar. In the case
of this people the grape vine appears to have
been the plant which appealed to them as
most efficiently manifesting the power of the
great mother. Hence they called this goddess '
'Mother Vine-Stalk,' or simply 'Goddess Vine-
Stalk. '"»

In Nigeria the ground is an objedl which
underlies many taboos, and to it sacrifices are
oflFered of many kinds.'" The feeling among
the Ibo-speaking peoples seems much like
that, if not the same, which governed in
Greece and Asia Minor before the person-
aUzing of the Great Mother." At the other
extreme the sky is regarded as father, though
in the Egyptian myth, which speaks of the

' Langdon, Tammuz and Ishtar, p. 43.
" Thomas, Anthropological Report, i. 11, et passim.
" Cf., for instance, Harrison, Prolegomena, pp. 260-271.

PARITY OF BEING 69

separation of earth and heaven (a myth that
is charadlerized by its diffusion or else is
indigenous in many regions), curiously enough
in a way adumbrating the theory of the
evolutionary origin of the worlds and appear-
ing in Gen. i, the respedlive genders of earth
and sky are reversed.^''

But such faith is not confined to celestial
objedts and the earth. Things terrestrial,
tangible or intangible, had each its own
spirit and life. Thus, to group a number of
these, winds, lightning, mountains, and forests
are sentient beings. Thus of some Africans
it is said that they hold that: "The wind
talks to the forest and the forest to the wind.
The tornado is often nothing more than a
quarrel between mountain and forest, lightning
and wind [jwhich latter is a servant of some-
thing else]; and we ourselves [|the Africans]
may get hit with the bits."" Pima Indians
think of Wind and Storm-cloud (Rain-man)
as supernatural persons who once did menial

" For a descriptive picture of this separation, cf. Brugsch,
Religion und Mythologie der Aegypter, p. 210, reproduced in
Homiletic Review, Oct., 1912, p. 275. For a crude form of this
myth of the separation of heaven and earth, see Westervelt,
Legends of Maui, pp. 31 ff.

" Milligan, Fetish Folk 0/ West Africa, p. 215.

70 ANIMISM

service for mortals, while Thunder also pos-
sesses personality, owns fire, and detedts the
thief of fire (the essentials of the story of
Prometheus are here);" and the notions of
the Omahas are quite similar. The Uriankhai
of Mongolia deify mountains, rivers, and the
wind.^^ The Zulus regard their rainmakers as
operating upon clouds as the Greeks thought
of Zeus the Cloud-gatherer, and to them
cloud and lightning are still sentient beings,
alive and full of power, though controlled by
the medicine men."

The sea is regarded in the same way. Hart-
land cites the case of the ancient Celts reported
by iEHan, supported in substance by native evi-
dence from Celtic tradition, who used to meet
the overflowing sea with drawn swords and
menacing spears, employing the same meth-
ods as those used towards human enemies."
Mr. Hartland refers also to the same notion
as exhibited by the Malays and reported by
Skeat. It would be easy to adduce testimony
to this same efFed from Africa, where the

" Fewkes, 2%th Annual Report of Bureau of Am. Ethnology,
PP- 43. 47; Fletcher and La Flesche, 22d Report, passim.
" Carruthers, Unknown Mongolia, i. 243. ,
" Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i. 109.
" Hartland, Ritual and Belief, pp. i6i ff.

PARITY OF BEING 71

natives of the West shore offer sacrifice to
the sea in order to induce it to grant an easy
landing. In folk-lore this idea is transformed
later in culture-history into the kelpies and
what-not that inhabit the waters; but students
of folk tales have no doubt that in the original
form the sea was regarded as possessing full
personality with all that is involved.

It seems superfluous almost to cite cases of
rivers which have personality, since classic
stories abound which bear out the claim. Yet
it is useful to show that such ideas are not
confined to the literature of Greece.^* For
instance, a traveler who was being conveyed
by canoe and paddle up a river was persuaded
by the Africans to turn back because a cloud
appeared over the stream, and they supposed
that it was caused by the river in displeasure
at the profanation of its waters by a stranger.
In other cases the river is simply possessed by
a spirit, to which offerings should be made in

'' For citations of rivers regarded as divinities by Greeks the
reader may consult Halliday, Greek Divination, pp. 116-117.
He will find there that springs also come under the same category.
Thus the spring at Kolophon rendered inspired the priest who
drank it (Tacitus, Annals, ii. 54; Pliny, ii. 103, 232). One
recalls inevitably the many sacred springs throughout the world,
the san(flity being but the attenuated form in which the old
belief has come down to us.

72 ANIMISM

order that no calamity may be suffered in the
crossing." The survival in poetry of the
thought of a river as a person may be illus-
trated from the Ramayana, where a river
becomes the wife of a king (xv. 20: 13), or
falls in love and bears a son (xiii. 2: 18).
The Ganges is a daughter and a goddess,
becomes a spouse and bears a son. In the
days of wife-capture, primitives would see in
a torrent into which a maiden had fallen a
male capturing his wife; or, in case of a man
falling in, they might think of a fierce female
seizing a husband. It will be recalled that
the Egyptians thought of the Nile as a short
ugly male with huge woman's breasts, sym-
bolizing the fertility which the river brought
to the land. In New Guinea the rivers are
besought as persons to make gifts of fish to
the Mafulu.2" In MongoUa they are deified.^""
The views of fire as a person, having attri-
butes that correspond, might be easily
supported by reference to the Vedic and
Brahmanic teaching respedling Agni, whose
name reappears in the Latin as ignis, fire.

" Roscoe, Baganda, pp. 318-319.

'" Williamson, South Sea Savage, p. 231.

"* Carruthers, Unknown Mongolia, i. 243.

PARITY OF BEING 73

The Kai of German New Guinea assert de-
liberately that fire has soul.^^ One might with
profit investigate the background of the Zoro-
astrian notion of the extreme sandlity of
fire, and the Aryo-Indian conceptions already
noted would be found lurking therein. Simi-
larly Malabars hold that a flame has life and
spirit, and fear the ghost of a flame that has
suddenly been quenched.^^

The evidence of belief in the life and power,
even of the divinity, of rocks and stones is
too abundant to be cited at any length. In
the Semitic sphere William Robertson Smith
has offered irrefutable evidence of worship of
such objedts — worship, it will be seen at
once, being evidence of belief in possession of
attributes equivalent to soul and spirit by
the objedt of devotion.'^ It is among the
curiosities of history that the stones of Carnac
in France and of RoUright in England are
said to leave their positions and to go down
to the sea, or to a spring to drink."* Africans
report that a large stone near a village patrols

2' Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. I43-J44-
22 Folk-lore, v. 297 ff.

" Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, and Religion of the
Semites.

" Folk-lore, v. 297 ff.

74 ANIMISM

the outskirts of that village during danger.^'
A great rock in the African region inhabited
by the Baganda is deemed sacred and is an
objed of worship and propitiation, and the
same is true of a meteorite.^^ The stone of
Nimm, an Etoi goddess, is now an altar, and
this is doubtless but a development from the
conception of it as endowed with life, as
might be abundantly illustrated from other
sources.'^' In Mongolia stones are among the
objefts of worship.^ In Melanesia stones and
rocks of many sorts receive offerings, and are
regarded either as the homes of spirits or as
being the possessors of these — the two are
not so far apart; also in the Solomon Islands
spirit is associated with stone. In the New
Hebrides large rocks are especially sacred.
Banks Islanders regard certain long stones
as so much alive that they can draw out a
man's soul if his shadow fall on them. In
Florida Island any peculiarly shaped stone
may have Hfe and soul attributed to it.^

^ D'Alviella, Hibbert Leaures, p. 54.
'* Roscoe, The Baganda, pp. 271-272, 290.
'' Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 171-172.
^ Carruthers, Unknown Mongolia, i. 56 IF.
" Codrington, Melanesians, pp. 119, 140, 143, 169, et passim;
Williamson, South Sea Savage, p. 178.

PARITY OF BEING 75

In many cases of this sort the attitude toward
them seems to imply in them a kind of sandity,
which is however but a more developed way of
thinking and is evidential of an earlier and
cruder mode of thought. A survival of this
charafter is in evidence near Laguna, New
Mexico, where seven jagged rocks are the
prisons of seven spirits.'" The stone of the
Omaha sweat lodge was regarded anthropo-
pathically.'^ The case of the Baganda meteor-
ite cited above is but one of many instances
of the kind in which veneration has been paid.
The two stones of the Kaaba at once occur to
the mind.'^ Adls 19: 35 furnishes a notable
instance. One may recall the very numerous
cases from ancient Greece — the sacred stone
at Delphi, that at Hyettos, the thirty wor-
shipped by the Pharaeans, the many Hermae
along the Greek roads referred to so often by
the classical writers.^' These were worshipped
and anointed with oil — compare the treat-
ment accorded Jacob's pillar (above, p. s).

I" Quoted by Wallis in JRP, July 1912, from Southern Work-
man, Nov. 1910.

'» Fletcher and La Flesche, zjth Report, etc., pp. S7S-S78-

»' New Scbaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, vi. 289.

^ Theophrastus, Charaderes ethici, xvi.; Pausanias, ed.
Frazer, VIII. xxxiv. 3; X. xxiv. 6, etc.

76 ANIMISM

At Aneiteum in Melanesia stones thought to
resemble objedls of desire or striving received
worship from various classes of people. Thus
one that was fish-shaped was venerated by
fishermen.^*

To catalogue here the various objeds in
nature which have had life attributed to them
would require much space. Mention will be
made of only the following in addition to those
already adduced. The rainbow is a thing
of life in Australia, inhabiting deep water-
holes in the mountains; it is seen only when it
is passing from one of these to another.
Approximately the same notion obtains in
Africa.^^ Among the Baganda of Africa, rain-
water is a totem (i.e., it is either an ancestor
or an ally).'* By Arabs the resin or gum from
which the frankincense of commerce is derived
is regarded as the blood of a tree, the soul of
which is a divinity, and the gathering of the
gum is attended by special ceremonies.*^ The
Tshemsheans of Alaska find their devotional
spirit awakened, as in the presence of a

^ Turner, Samoa, p. 327.

3' Mathew, Eagle-hawk and Crow, p. 146; Missions Caiholiques,
no. 239, p. 592.

" Roscoe, The Baganda, p. 140.

" Zehnpfund, in New Schaf-Herzog Encyclopedia, iv. 372.

PARITY OF BEING 77

supernatural being, by precipices, tidal waves,
or indeed almost any objed or phenomenon
that is strange to them.^*

2. SOUL IN THINGS ARTIFICIAL

A rather noted controversy over theories of
language, and incidentally of myth and reli-
gion, once took place between Professors Max
Miiller and Whitney, in which, a little after
the event, the late Andrew Lang took a hand.
The Oxford scholar saw in myth "a disease of
language," and Mr. Lang replied that what
the data showed was a disease of thought.
By this Mr. Lang intended to convey the idea
that man was astray either in his observations
or in the deductions he made from them.
How far astray from the truth man often was
we have already seen. But notions even
more strange are yet to be cited. One of the
earliest literary testimonies to the class of
ideas to be noted in this sedtion is found in
one of the minor prophets, who declares :

"They (men) sacrifice unto their net, and
burn incense unto their drags; because by
them their portion is fat, and their meat

^ Ardander, Apostle of Alaska, pp. 100 ff.

78 ANIMISM

plenteous.'^" Here we have a fadt stated, as
well as the reason for the fadt which can be
duplicated from many different quarters even
in our own day. Objedls which were the
produdl of man's own handicraft, the genesis
of which and whole produdtion and mode of
use he knew, received his homage. Hunting
implements and those used in agriculture are
by man endowed with life and power before
which he bows in reverence. In India there
is a festival lasting three days, observed in
Odlober by Hindoos of all castes, including
the Brahmins, which has to do with the
worship of all sorts of tools and implements.
In many cases it is doubtless but the survival
of a custom; in very many others, however,
the original element of ascription of life or
divinity still inheres.^" It is not so very
difficult to see the reason for the primitive
mind's being afFedled in this way. Why should
the mere scratching of the earth with a rude
hoe and the deposition of a seed produce so
bountiful and, to it, strange results? What
did early man know of the chemistry of
nature? Was it not the spirit in the hoe

» Habakkuk i: i6.

*• Cf. Thurston, Omens and Superstitions, pp. 174-175.

PARIT7 OF BEING 79

that made the gift of the harvest? If we
were to study fetishism, we should discover
that man beUeves that he can bring together
"odds and ends" in a bundle or bag, and that
a spirit will take up its abode there. Why
should not with easy plausibility the hoe or
net or drag equally be or become animate?
It is perhaps not at all wonderful that in
India particularly, perhaps elsewhere, the
fire-drill was an objedl of devotion and con-
ceived to be divine. When we recall the
fadt, now so familiar to us, but remaining to
the Hindoos for millenniums one of the
arcana of nature, viz., that from a place where
apparently there was no fire, fire may be
evoked, literally called into being, we can
begin to appreciate in some small degree
man's awe before such phenomena. We can
find the same awe existing in Fiji, where,
besides stones, houses, and canoes, tools of
various sorts are credited with souls and
believed to be immortal.*^ In the same region
so isolated and insignificant a thing as a
whale's tooth is credited with life and immor-
tality; so the Fijian ghost in the spirit land
on occasion throws at a pandanus tree the

" Williams, Fiji, i. 241.

8o ANIMISM

ghost of the whale's tooth that was buried
with his body.'*^

Not less curious than the foregoing is the
fadt that food and the like have been and
still are regarded as animate and possessed of
spirit. The ancient Egyptians provided for
the ka, soul or double of the deceased, articles
of food, drink, or clothing, so that it need
not suffer hunger, thirst, or cold. But the
ka, being ethereal, did not use the things
themselves, but only the parts of them that
stood in the same relation to the things as
the ka did to the deceased, i.e., their souls or
doubles. So that there a conception won-
drously like that of spirit or soul is attributed
to articles of food, drink, and clothing. In
the earlier stages of Egyptian civilization, the
things devoted to the deceased were purposely
mutilated; and it requires no stretch of the
imagination, had we no contemporaneous
testimony to the fadl, to see in this mutilation
of the offerings the same process as we are
familiar with in another connedlion, viz., the
killing of the offerings.^' Just as slaves and
wives were sent through the gates of death

« Williams, Fiji, i. 243 IF.

" Ancient Egypt, ii (1914), 123.

PARITY OF BEING 8i

to serve their dead lord, so were implements,
weapons, ornaments and food. In Nigeria
around funeral shrines are fragments of house-
hold belongings, which have been broken so
that their astral forms may be set free to be
carried by the owner's shade to its spirit
home.** In perfed: agreement with this trend
of thought, the Dyaks of Borneo bury with
the body various utensils, and hold that
these have spirits which the deceased takes
along with him to his new home and puts to
good use.*^ In Central Africa baskets, hoe-
handles, pots that have been perforated,
broken cups and the like are placed at graves,
having been killed by breaking that their
spirits may go to the spirit land there to do
service.^^ In like fashion the Bakongos endow
bottles, cloths, umbrellas and similar articles
with spirit.*^ Talbot learned in Africa that to
a cloth can be imparted personal qualities, so
that it breaks out into speech.** Even orna-
ments may have soul, according to the Melane-

** Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurredion, ii. 1 19-120;
Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 6 flF.
*" Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, pp. 138, 142.
** Werner, Native Races, pp. 155, 159.
« Weeks, Primitive Bakongo, pp. 269, 272.
" Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, p. 226.

82 ANIMISM

sians of New Guinea, and their souls, evapo-
rated by fire, are offered to disease demons
which have operated by extracting a human
soul from its abode.*' The Kai of German
New Guinea offer food and viands to the
ghosts of their dead, which considerately eat
only the soul thereof and leave the substance
to those who offer it.™ It would seem from
certain passages in the Old Testament that
the conception once existed that even a part
of the body might have individual life and
power. Witness the expression, "El (God)
of my hand" (Gen. 31:29; Deut. 28:32;
Micah 2:1; Prov. 3:27; Neh. 5:5)." Even
so abstradl a conception as the year receives
homage as a personality among the Ibo-
speaking peoples, who, by the way, place
rivers among the great powers which they
name Alose.*^

*' Seligtnann, Mdanesians, pp. 189 fF.
™ Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 145 ff., 4898"., 513 ff.
[_" B. D. Eerdmans, in Expositor, Nov. 1913, p. 386.
** Thomas, Anthropological Report, pp. 27 ff.

PARITY OF BEING 83

3. SOUL OR SPIRIT IN THE VEGETABLE
WORLD

If things so obviously inanimate as those
we have just noticed could be regarded as
possessing the attributes of life and soul, it is
no wonder that the vegetable world was
thought to exhibit the same qualities. The
plant has the power of producing pregnancy
in the human species, since leaf and flower
from certain specified kinds of plants, faUing
on a woman, get her with child.*' In Melanesia
the Cycas and the Casuarina are sacred, and
in folk-lore the Cycas becomes a maiden.
Children also are believed to have sprung
from trees, fruits, and other vegetable growths.**
In Australia the cones of the Casuarina are
supposed to have eidola which, when released
by burning, attack the eyes of bystanders
and cause blindness — in all probability the
stinging charadter of the smoke is thus ex-
plained.** Trees have souls, feel pain, and
even hold conversation, and this is not con-

'' Roscoe, The Baganda, p. 48.

" Codrington, Melanesians, p. 187; cf. Talbot, In the Shadow
of the Bush, pp. I33-I3S-

"* Howitt, Native Tribes 0/ South-east Australia, pp. 363,
366, 376-377. 453-

84 ANIMISM

fined to the larger growths, being extended
to plants or shrubs, and some skilled humans
have had the knowledge of plant language."
The fertihzation of trees may be regarded as
the result of desire and voluntative adlion.
Malays believe implicitly in the souls of trees
and consider it appropriate to make offerings
to them.^^ The tree as oracle in Ancient
Greece and elsewhere is a well known fadl —
cf. the sacred oak at Dodona, whose characfter
is standing evidence of belief in its divinity,
and this in ancient times included the idea of
intelligent life and soul. One might produce
abundance of evidence of ascription of these
possessions to plants from the phenomena of
totemism, the idea here being either descent
from or alliance with some particular species
of plant, treatment of which was always
respedlful and like that accorded to members
of the human tribe or clan. Thus, to cite but
a single instance out of the many available,
such plants as the bean, mushroom, and yam

" Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 30-36, 177-178, 181,
287, 299-300; D'Alviella, Hibbert Ledures, pp. 53 fF. In the tale
of Anpu and Bata (Petrie, Egyptian Tales, 2d series, pp. 48 ff.)
the tree has power of speech.

" Skeat, Malay Magic, pp. 194; Homiletic Review, July, 1912,
pp. 14-15; Hartland, Legend 0} Perseus, ii. 441.

PARITY OF BEING 85

occur as totems among the Baganda.^' Among
the Ibo-speaking peoples trees known as
Ojuku and Ngu belong to the powers known
as Alose, and so akin to man are certain trees
that in the process of reincarnation their
souls may animate human bodies.^' The wor-
ship of the tree has received attention so
frequent and elaborate as here not to call for
extended treatment. From the British Isles
across Europe and Asia evidence of this cult
is abundant, and has been increased in the
excavations which have brought to light the
ancient Mycenaean and Mediterranean civili-
zations. How widespread this worship has
been in India may be seen from the sculpture
still in existence, some of which has been
illustrated and studied by Fergusson.*"

Among the Mafulu of New Guinea the yam
is regarded as having personality, and possess-
ing a sweetheart plant.*^ One of the most
remarkable testimonies to the feeling of primi-
tive man in reference to the forest is the
following from Lange; speaking of an Indian
alone in the bush:

« J. Roscoe, ne Baganda, pp. 138-140.
" N. W. Thomas, Anthropological Report, i. 27, 28, 3 1, et passim.
"' Tree and Serpent Worship; cf. Homiletic Review, July, 1912.
" Williamson, South Sea Savage, pp. 233 ff.

86 ANIMISM

"It appears to the Indian that he is beside
himself; he feels strange exterior influences
of an almost overwhelming charaAer, foreign
to men who are only used to a civilized life
and whose path is far away from the wilder-
ness. It appears to him now that an invisible
and almost irresistible force is trying to at-
tract him, and to lead him deeper and deeper
into the forest, perhaps there to perish. He
feels the sense of fear; he argues with him-
self: 'The forest wants to destroy me, to kill
me, to absorb me.' After he returns to his
hut, he says: *I was hunting, the forest
wanted to kill me, and got me almost into its
power, but I escaped and I have returned
safely.'" «2

4. SOUL OR SPIRIT IN ANIMALS

If the principle of "parity of being" involves
the conception of life and soul in inanimate
objedls and in the plant world, a fortiori we
should expedl that animals would be endowed,
in the mind of primitives, with the same
qualities. Here again no exhaustive examina-
tion and colleAion of cases can be presented,

^^ Lange, The Lower Amazon, p. 424.

PARITY OF BEING 87

so extensive is the evidence. What will be
offered will show simply the range of the idea
and the completeness with which it is carried
out.

"In all African fables the various animals
are but thinly disguised human beings." ^
Even the lower forms of animal life, such as
the starfish, indeed totally mythical examples
of this species, have been regarded as possessed
of or as being spirit. Thus in the Murray
River region of Australia a huge starfish is
supposed to be a spirit and to inhabit a deep
water hole.** Animals hke lions, leopards,
crocodiles, sheep, reptiles, and others have
ghosts that are dangerous after death and
must be placated or guarded against.*^ Ainus
treat as a god a captive bear, and when it is
killed for food, some of its own flesh is offered
to it as a sacrifice.*® Many other peoples in
different quarters of the world — American
Indians, Malays, and so on — treat with
pretended or real honor the game animal
they slay, or attempt to cajole it or deceive it,

«5 Milligan, Fetish Folk of West Africa, p. 215.

" Taplin, Narrinyeri, p. 138.

^ Roscoe, The Baganda, pp. 288-289.

" Batchelor, Ainus and their Folk-lore, pp. 486-496.

88 ANIMISM

just as they would attempt to cajole or deceive
one of their own species if success seemed
likely, in order that its spirit or its blood kin
may not avenge its slaughter. Malays will
cry out to a tiger which they have trapped
that "Mohammed set the trap," so as to
send its spirit on a false scent when it starts
out for revenge.*^ Among the Dyaks the
crocodile when caught "is addressed in eulo-
gistic language and beguiled, so the people
say, into offering no resistance. He is .called
a rajah among animals, and is told that he has
come on a friendly visit and must behave
accordingly. . . . Though the animal is spoken
to in such flattering terms before he is secured,
the moment ... he is powerless for evil,
they deride him for his stupidity."^ Their
treatment of bears and tigers is quite similar.
Few fads could more emphatically demon-
strate the complete parity of animals with
man, as conceived by various races, than the
remarkable one that animals have been
credited with organization into kinships,
families, societies, and governments, and

" Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 167; cf. Charlevoix, Journal d'un
voyage dans I'Amerique septentrionale, v. 173.
" Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, pp. S9-6o.

PARITY OF BEING 89

that they are held to perform even worship.*'
The extreme example of what Andrew Lang
called "disease of thought" in this diredion
has already been noted, in the cases where
man regards himself indifferently as a casso-
wary or some other totem gens, or on the other
hand considers the animal species as the same
as himself.™ This curious operation of the
mind may be further illustrated by two other
examples. The islanders of Mabuiag say of
the cassowary that "he all same as relation,
he belong same family," and Alaskans took
the first Russians whom they saw for cuttle
fish because of the buttons on their clothes.^^
It is, after this, no subjedl for wonder if a
Zuni Indian see in a turtle or rabbit or hedge-
hog the embodiment of one of his ancestors,
or that a totem clan can trace origins back
to planet or sun, to bird, beast, or reptile.''^
The complete parity of different states of
existence is here in evidence; and implicit

*" Illustrations of monkeys performing the z&s of worship
are abundantly found in the sculptures of India; cf worship of
the sacred tree in Fergusson's Tree and Serpent Worship, and
Homiletic Review, July, 1912.

™ See p. 8.

" Frazer, Golden Bough", ii. 388 ff.

« F. Gushing, in Century Magazine, May, 1883; and Zuni
Tales, passim.

90 ANIMISM

always, explicit most of the time, is the idea
of possession of spirit or soul, though the
conception is necessarily vague.

Further testimony is furnished by the
peoples who hold that animals, birds, and the
Hke understand human speech, have languages
of their own, talk, perform the operations of
reason, engage in trade, are subjedt to passions,
yield to coaxing, blandishment or deception,
play tricks on each other and on humans,
scheme for each other's hurt or death, and
perform many humanlike actions.^^ The Mel-
anesians attribute to the snake the power of
articulate speech; and the dog is equally well
endowed, if we may listen to the Blacks of
Australia.^* Africans of the Niger region are
not alone in giving speech and reason to the
parrot, and they know that a hawk takes a
tree as a wife.''' These cases are curiously
duplicated among the Pima Indians, where
the dog used to have the power to speak, and

" Roscoe, The Baganda, pp. 467-483; cf. the collection of cases
in Frazer, Taboo, ii. 169-273, 398-404, of incidents showing
treatment of animals as though possessed of the sentimentalities,
etc., of human beings; note the speech of cattle, etc., in the
"Tale of Anpu and Bata," Petrie, Egyptian Tales, ii. 48 IF.

'• Codrington, Melanesians, p. 151; Fison and Howitt, Kam-
ilaroi and Kurnai, p. 218.

" Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 252, 253, 299-300.

PARITY OF BEING 91

an eagle took the form of an old woman and
seized and carried ofF a girl as a wife. A
legendary personage also becomes a snake,
and another named Tonto drinks "medicine"
and becomes an eagle.^* The folk-lore of
India is rich in this sort of tale. Animals,
led by the crafty jackal (which takes the place
of the fox in the Occident), not only talk and
lay deep plots, but adl in all ways like humans.
And the same is true of the feathered tribes.
It is of course not strange that the parrot
should talk, but other birds are as well en-
dowed, so the report goes, and, besides, know
how to cure diseases. Wild elephants are
worshipped by the Kadirs of India. The
dogs, pigs, and other domestic animals of the
dead at Tubetube, British New Guiana, have
spirits which find their owners in the spirit
land."

A reader who knew nothing of the inter-
pretation of the serpent in Gen. 3 which has
been current in Jewish and Christian circles

™ Fewkes, ^th Report, etc., pp. 44, 45, 48, 52.

" Cf. Day, Folk-Tales of Bengal, p. 134; Steel and Temple,
Wide-awake Stories, pp. 66-67; Thurston, Omens and Super-
stitions, p. 83; Parker, Village Folk Tales 0/ Ceylon, pp. 113 IF.
122 ff., 2C39 ff., 213 ff., et passim; Brown, Melanesians and Poly-
nesians, pp. 443 ff.; Williamson, South Sea Savages, p. 65.

92 ANIMISM

would see in that deceiver an animal cast in
the form of primitive belief, endowed with
cunning and with power of speech — an
animal, and nothing more. The reading which
makes of it a form assumed by the devil for
purposes of guile belongs to a much later age
than the story itself. In many lands one may
find stories parallel to this one regarded as an
animistic "left-over." The early Egyptians
could tell of a serpent tribe that had reason,
speech, organized society, government, and
manners that some modern nations might
copy to their own credit and the comfort of
their neighbours. They had stories that dealt
with walking and winged serpents, such as
Eve's beast apparently was before the curse.
And in our own day the Ekoi of West Africa
know of reptiles that once had hands and
feet and led a family life.^* In Melanesia the
snake is (or is associated with) spirit.™ On
the worship of the serpent much has been
colledled, and more is continually coming to
light.*" The complete parity of this animal

" Petrie, Egyptian Tales, i. 8l fiF.; Talbot, In the Shadow of the
Bush, pp. 374-377.

" Codrington, Melanesians, p. 189.

"^ Cf. the article "Serpent" etc. in The New Schaff-Henog
Encyclopedia, x. 363-370; Schlegel, SchlUssel zur Ewe-Spracbe,

PARITY OF BEING 93

with man in these respedls is illustrated farther
by the fadl that the snake may wed with
mortals.*^

p. 14; Milligan, Fetish Folk of West Africa, pp. 233-234; and
the two notable volumes of Miss Harrison, Prolegomena, and
Themis, where the dominance of the serpent idea and its con-
tinuance are none the less markedly exhibited in that this pai^
ticular phase is not at all the main thesis of her works, and is
therefore incidental and the more striking.
" Thurston, Omens and Superstitions, p. 91

VI

BELIEF IN "FREE SPIRITS'

VI
BELIEF IN "FREE SPIRITS"

TT is not to be supposed that life, soul,
-^ spirit, possessing emotional, volitional, and
fadlual potency, was limited in savage man's
conception to the tangible and visible. If the
soul of man was itself invisible, and if soul
were a possession of plants, animals, and
other natural objedls, yet perceived only by
its operations, why should there not be other
souls "loose in the universe," unseen and
unfelt except as they revealed themselves by
their activities or manifestations to the world
of sense? So man seems to have reasoned,
and this belief abides today in the minds of
the mass of mankind, even in Christendom.
Spirits, unfixed so to speak, having form and
substance, indeed, but not body, roamed free
and unfettered in air, on land, in the waters.
They lurked in nook and cranny, behind bush
and tree and rock; they came in storm and
wind; they inhabited the woods, floated in
the atmosphere, swam in the sea and in lake

97

98 ANIMISM

and stream, parched in the desert, hid in cave
or roamed on mountain top. Wherever mys-
tery is possible, there man imagines non-human
spirits to exist. A suggestion of the enormity
of the numbers of spirits whose existence is
conceived is given by the following from the
strongly animistic Shinto faith of Japan in
comparatively modern times.

"Reverently adoring the great god of the
two palaces of Ise (the sun-goddess) in the
first place, the 800 myriads of celestial kami,
the 800 myriads of ancestral kami, all the
1,500 myriads to whom are consecrated the
great and small temples in all provinces, all
islands and all places in the great land of
eight islands, the 1,500 myriads of kami
whom they cause to serve them. ... I pray
with awe that they will deign to corredt the
unwitting faults which, heard and seen by
them, I have committed, and, blessing and
favouring me according to the powers which
they severally wield, cause me to follow the
divine example, and to perform good works
in the way." ^

Examples at almost any length might be

* Quoted by Carpenter, Comparative Religion, p. 93, from a
morning prayer by Hirata, a Japanese (1776-1843).

BELIEF IN "FREE SPIRITS" 99

cited from modern works of contemporaries.
Only a few instances will be given here simply
to illustrate the principle. Central Aus-
tralians believe in the existence of Wullunqua,
a dread spirit which inhabits a deep water
hole.'^ And other tribes of that continent
have similar traditions, such as the Narrinyeri,
who know of a like spirit, the Mulgewauke.*
By the inhabitants of New Guinea spirits,
non-human, are supposed to inhabit any place
with unusual physical charadteristics — water-
fall, pool, queer-shaped rock, or the like.*
Of the Guiana native Im Thurn says:

"His whole world swarms with beings. He
is surrounded by a host of them, possibly
harmful. It is therefore not wonderful that
the Indian fears to be without his fellow,
fears even to move beyond the light of his
camp-lire, and when obliged to do so, carries
a fire-brand with him, that he may have a
chance of seeing the beings among whom he
moves." ^

Truly the angelology and demonology of
advanced faiths have a long ancestry.

• Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes, etc., passim.

• Taplin, Narrinyeri, pp. 48, 91.

• Williamson, Ways of South Sea Savage, p. 283.
' Among the Indians oj Guiana.

loo ANIMISM

As already suggested, the groundwork for
such a faith was already laid in the observa-
tions and deductions regarding man's soul.
If in sleep his spirit could go forth unseen by
companions who were near, in order that it
might perform the deeds of the dream state
so real to the savage; if it were true that a
faint were caused by the temporary desertion
of its home by the soul; if at death it could
depart without detedtion by those intent in
their watch over the ailing, and reveal its
invisibility by going forth unseen to a dis-
embodied existence, why should there not be
numerous other spirits — either temporarily
or permanently and by nature bodiless —
abroad in the universe ? This would be normal
reasoning, and was a(5lual. The belief is so
well known, evidences of it are so easily
accessible, that dired demonstration here is
hardly obligatory. As a matter of fad:, in
parts of our discussion yet to come, the proof
will appear incidentally, so that to give it
here would be but to duplicate what is both
implicit and explicit in testimony on another
but related line of investigation.

In a recent paragraph the words "angel-
ology" and "demonology" were employed,

BELIEF IN "FREE SPIRITS" loi

and in their use there is implicit a fundamental
philosophy which has swayed the conceptions,
awakened the hopes and aroused the fears,
helped to form the cults, and controlled the
adlions of men in all ages and climes for
which diredt testimony is adducible. The
dualism of substance, body and spirit, inherent
in the notions of animism is paralleled by a
coincident dualism of charader. There were
good spirits and bad, white spirits and black.
And this charadler was determined by their
supposed favor or disfavor toward man.
There were also good spirits which by reason
of their emotional natures were capable of
showing inimical traits, while the bad might
be pacified, rendered innocuous or even
friendly, by the appropriate treatment.

This is, of course, but the refledtion of men's
interpretation of their own nature and ex-
periences, the result of their reasoning about
that nature and those experiences. Some-
times enterprises went awry without any
cause to them discoverable; again, good
fortune attended their ventures, and this in
spite of what seemed to them legitimate fears
and untoward beginnings. But on the hypo-
thesis of hosts of invisible beings all about

I02 ANIMISM

them, good or ill fortune was fully accounted
for by the diredlion or interference of these
spirits in man's favor or against him. To
any event or happening otherwise unaccount-
able a cause was assigned in the adlion of
spirits which worked when, where, and how
they pleased. And as the human being was
amenable to gift or praise • or request, so
would the spirits yield to similar courses of
treatment. As he was vexed or angered by
opposition to his will or by actual harm, so,
he reasoned, the spirits could be enraged by
human doings contrary to their desires. Once
more, just as he might, when angered, be
placated by use of the proper means, so would
the spirits be soothed and rendered benign
were they properly approached. As he suc-
cumbed or gave way before force greater than
his own or was overcome by craft and cunning,
the spirits too must yield {{force majeure could
be brought to bear on them or if they could
be outwitted.

VII

"FREE SPIRITS" — THEIR CONSTI-
TUTION AND ACTIVITIES

VII

"FREE SPIRITS" — THEIR CONSTI-
TUTION AND ACTIVITIES

'T^HE existence and great numbers of
■*- spirits which are, so to speak, "free" in
the universe have just been shown and dis-
cussed.^ We have noted, too, how readily
enters here all that we are accustomed to call
miraculous. Only we have constantly to
remember that what we call by that name is
to primitive people in full accordance with
nature as they understand it. The very
conception of miracle implies arrival at the
thought of a certain uniformity of nature,
invariability of cause and eflPedt outside of
which the unexpedled may happen — and
does. It now remains to consider the con-
stitution and adlivities of the "free" spirits
referred to above. A poetical ^description,
having its origin in Babylonia, may here be
quoted and serve as a starting point.

1 Above, pp. 97 IF.
los

io6 ANIMISM

Great storms sent from heaven, are they.

The owl that hoots in the city, are they.

Of Anus creation,^ children horn of earth, are

they.
The highest walls, the broadest walls, like a flood,

they pass.
From house to house they break through.
No door can shut them out.
No bolt can turn them back.
Through the door like a snake, they glide.
Through the hinge like a wind, they blow}^

Indeed their substance is even more subtle
than this account indicates. They can invade
a body already possessed by its own spirit
and dominate that body for good or evil, or
even drive out the native spirit and auto-
cratically rule the captured body. The cap-
ture may be temporary or permanent. The
words "demoniac" in English, hideos and
w/i^XrjiTTos ^ in Greek, express the two fads
of "possession" for evil or for good. Simi-

' Assyr. lit. "outpouring/' i.e., oi semen.

" From cuneiform tablet V, lines 18-35, in the Utukki Limnvti
series {Cuneiform Texts XVI. plate 2); translation kindly fur-
nished by the Rev. Professor Robert W. Rogers, D.D., LL.D., of
Drew Theological Seminary, Madison, N. J.

' Plato, Phcedrus, 238, 241.

"FREE SPIRITS" 107

larly the word "ecstasy" (Greek ko-rao-w)*
sets forth the belief in the temporary departure
from the body of its own spirit, sometimes for
communion apart from the body with other
spirits; and another Greek word, ivBvaiaaijAs,
denotes the entrance into the human organism
of a superhuman spirit and the consequent
elevation of feeling and surge of emotion.
Though the examples thus far cited register
the conceptions of peoples advanced in culture,
like Greeks, Romans, and Babylonians, they
are not the possession exclusively of such;
indeed they are survivals from a cruder age.
Primitive peoples low in the scale of culture
entertain them. Such folk think of the spirits
as pervasive and subtle, to whom no doors
are closed; as entering with equal facility
portals barred with the grosser materials —
wood, iron, or stone — or with the living
flesh.*

While thus in a manner insubstantial and
ethereal in constitution, like discarnated hu-
man spirits, they have needs, wants, and
preferences to which the material may minister.
If the gods in the Babylonian epic of the

* New Schaff-Herwg Encyclopedia, iv. 71-72.
' Murray, Ancient Egyptian Legends, pp. II ff.

io8 ANIMISM

deluge could smell the savor of the post-
diluvian offering and "hover like flies over
the sacrifice," * not less susceptible to appeals
offered by material substance are the spirits
now under consideration. They have the
enjoyments and repulsions of the senses —
smell, taste, even grosser physical passions,'
and so are propitiable or susceptible of anger.
While free to roam, they have chosen homes
and haunts all their own,^ though they may
become localized in objedls of nature, as in
India,' where so often a stone is the seat of
deity, and among the Fang and Mpongwe,
so that it seems as if nature is lawless and
hostile.!"

" As for disposition, since primitive man
measures all things by himself, only intensify-
ing the idea of power — through the use of
his imagination, where the element of mystery
enters — it would be expedled that spirits
would be good, evil, or neutral except when

' Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels, p. 98.

' Frazer, Scapegoat, pp. 112-113; Gen. 6: 1-4; Tobit 8:
1-3; Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 213; Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo,
pp. 194-204; Thomas, Anthropological Report, p. 127.
, ' Keller, Madagascar, p. 98.

' Methodist Recorder (London), July 10, 1913.

" Milligan, Fetish Folk, p. 279.

"FREE SPIRITS" 109

conciliated or offended;" that good spirits
could be aroused to wrath by negled or
affront, while evil spirits could be appeased,
mollified, or at least rendered harmless by
right measures. Some of these spirits are
portrayed as jealous and envious, particularly
hostile to strangers, and disliking to hear
praise of those mortals or their progeny who
inhabit the land where these spirits live.^''
New Guineans, however proud of wife, chil-
dren, or possessions, never praise them but
always speak in deprecatory terms. They
also dislike to go into the region of another
tribe, even for medical treatment, lest the
spirits there resident be offended and work
them harm.'' It will be seen at once how
these beliefs affedt habits of travel and social
intercourse.

The varied names of different kinds of
spirits are probably a legacy from very early
times. We may gather something from our
own folk-lore, which mentions fairies and
pixies, gnomes, trolls, fauns, satyrs, and dwarfs,
elves, vampires, and goblins, sirens, mermaids,

« Cox, Folk-lore, chap. III.

^ Parker, Village Folk Tales of Ceylon, i. i6, et passim.

•* Newton, In Far New Guinea, pp. 86, 120.

no ANIMISM

and kelpies, nymphs, dryads, and naiads, and
all their ilk, whose existence and habits are
better known to nurses and nursery children
than to the unimaginative scientist. While
these creatures are not indeed the free spirits
of whom we are speaking, they illustrate the
belief in such spirits. For these familiars of
childhood are no modern creation, they are
survivals of pre-Christian faith, and like the
free spirits have all the variety that wild
imagination could conjure.^*

It must not be forgotten, moreover, that the
same fate may overtake them as could threaten
gods themselves in ancient Egypt — they
were not above the hap of death. In Ceylon
the Yaka (a sort of evil spirit) is mortal.^* It
may be that out of this thought grew some of
the notions respedting the mentality of spirits.
We have seen that they are placable and
conciliable; they are also compellable and
beguilable — by bluff, magic, or threat or
use of means productive of results pleasant or
repugnant to them.^®

" Thomas, Anthropological Report, p. 27.

" Parker, Village Folk Tales, pp. 143, 265, 274.

1= Tobit,8: 1-3; T>'k\\\t\\2,,HibbertLeaures, pp. 87 ff.; Batche-
lor, Ainu, pp. 42-43; Furness, Head-hunters, pp. 16-17; Weeks,
Congo Cannibals, pp. 267 fip.; Kloss, In the Andamans, pp. 230 ff.

"FREE SPIRITS" iii

It will at once appear how fruitful this idea
is in connexion with shamanism. Sometimes
the only control of spirits and salvation of
the people is through shamans." The Wol-
lunqua of Central Australia, a snake spirit,
can be either pacified or coerced by magical
ceremonies into doing no harm to celebrants
of certain rites.^* The Narrinyeri often have
a mock fight in pretense of avenging a death
accredited to sorcery." Some Australians are
particularly assured that these spirits may be
outwitted.^" The Ceylonese are convinced that
a Yaka (the man-eating demon referred to
above) may be bluffed into good behavior.''*
The Ainu of Japan also regard spirits as
beguilable.^^

If spirits are compellable, submissive to
control by mortals such as medicine men and
the like, the way is open for a whole series of
attacks in which not only the wills of the
spirits but those of mortals, friends, and

" Carruthers, Unknown Mongolia, i. 150 fF.

" Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, p. 238.

" Taplin, Narrinyeri, p. 21.

™ Curr, Australian Race, i. 87; Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 463,

473. 481-

21 Parker, Village Folk Tales, p. 149.
" Batchelor, Ainu, pp. 42-43.

112 ANIMISM

enemies combine to the resultant weal or woe
of human beings. Wizardry and sorcery,
with their awful fears and dread results, enter
by this as by other doors. And this is by no
means always sheer imposture, as the following
shows.

"The sorcerer believes in his own power,
and the people believe in it too. Certainly
the New Guinea philosophy of life is that
nothing happens to man without some cause;
no man dies a natural death, all suffering and
sickness is due to evil spirits which people
this world, and as, like many of his white
brethren, he is quite prepared to take the
good things of life unquestioning, and only to
look for causes when evil comes, there is no
place in his philosophy for good spirits; the
good is but the normal state undisturbed by
the machinations of evil spirits, and the evil
spirits are usually set to work by some human
agent. Though it seems that while the sor-
cerer may use charms, working through the
hair that has been mislaid when the head was
shaven, or through the footprints, he is power-
ful enough to work at times more diredlly.
He is probably a man of stronger charadler
than his fellows — Hke other trades, it runs in

"FREE SPIRITS" 113

certain families — and the very fad that he
believes in his power, and others believe in it,
tends to make him independent and strong
in character. He thrives on his reputation,
and levies blackmail on all and sundry till
some evil day when patience has been ex-
hausted, and an opportunity offers to put
him out of the way. Ordinarily he is safe,
for no one will touch him or interfere with
him unless he can be taken by surprise, and
there are always sufferers ready to take the
first chance of doing that. How they used to
terrorize the neighborhood and take toll!
One old ruffian, whose reputation had spread
far and wide, could go to villages far from
home, and walk off with anything he fancied,
the people sitting mum not daring to say a
word, or hiding and skulking away as he
passed through the village. One of the strong-
est characters in a village miles away from
where this villain lived said, 'Give me a
guaranty that I shall not be called to account,
and a gun so that I can shoot him when he
is not looking, and I will get rid of him, but
I dare not touch him if his eyes are on me.'"^'
But apart from adtion by these beings

" Newton, In Far New Guinea, p. 78.

„4 ANIMISM

which is determined by human will, desire,
vengeance, and other passions, man is an
objed of interest to the spirits themselves,
and they show adlivity in one way or another,
for good or for ill efFed upon his fortunes and
his person. It is, however, for ill that their
principal adivity is direAed, as estimated by
primitives. They work mainly against man
and his welfare. In Ceylon, for instance,
where innumerable evil spirits are to be found,
they are charged with every untoward happen-
ing, either as themselves purposing it or as
controlled or instigated by inimical magicians,
or even because opportunity offers and their
essential nature prompts to its seizure.^^ They
interpenetrate the bodies of living men and
cause illness; they may be expelled by divine
power, and still, notwithstanding that they
have done assault and damage, may demand
and be accorded offerings, sacrifices, and
libations.^^ In fad, among rude peoples, dis-
eases are nearly universally attributed to evil
spirits through the medium of possession.^'
Not seldom control is by a witch, in whose

^ Parker, Fillage Folk Tales, p. i6; cf. Gomes, Sea Dyaks of
Borneo, pp. 194 ff.

*' Murray, Ancient Egyptian Legends, pp. 11 ff.
^ Batchelor, Ainu, pp. 42-43.

"FREE SPIRITS" 115

body the spirit of mischief takes up its resi-
dence. Thence she sends it forth on its
mission of evil, and thither it returns when
its work is done. As she can thus by proxy
efFedt evil, so can she cause it to cease." Nat-
urally this notion lingers on into advanced
stages of culture, as is witnessed by the
frequent mention of demoniacs in the New
Testament, to say nothing of the witchcraft
delusion which came on down through the
Middle Ages into comparatively modern times.^
In these advanced stages it is not unusual for
these demons to specialize, so to speak, in
diseases; so that in China, India, and else-
where there may be a cholera devil, a dog-god
who sends whooping cough, etc.^' Infants are
particularly liable to attack.^" The normal
result is that in some regions drugs and
simples are little resorted to in sickness,
medicine men and wizards are the main
reliance or the only recourse.'^ These spirits

" Newton, In Far New Guinea, p. 83.

™ Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, pp. 164 fF.; Thurston, Omens
and Superstitions, pp. 176, 196; Williamson, South Sea Savage,
p. z86.

^ Cf. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, iii. 148 ff., 1181.

'" Thomas, Anthropological Report, p. 71.

" Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, p. 183; lAE, vi. 85 S.

ii6 ANIMISM

sometimes work in a way different from
possession; for example, causing fever by
enticing the soul from the body.^* We may
not forget that the madness of frenzy, whether
as insanity or as prophetic mania, is regarded,
as we have already had occasion to notice,
as the result of possession.^'

The damaging adtivities of these spirits may
be diredled not only against the persons, but
against the possessions and all the various
operations and pursuits of humans.'^ And
such evils may at times be prevented or
remedied by means as weird as the alleged or
supposed disease or hurt. For example,
damage by spirits to a plot of agricultural
ground may be prevented by killing, boiling,
and burying a black cat by night under a
tree in the field.'^ All along the line of these
conceptions, the promptings to magical opera-
tions are the nearly universal accompaniment.

'* Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 185 ff.

" Additional cases are cited in Thurston, Omens and Super-
stitions, pp. 254, 278, 279, 285.

" Carruthers, Unknown Mongolia, i. 245.
" Jahn, Opfergebrauche, p. 267.

VIII

LOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF
PARITY OF BEING

VIII

LOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF
PARITY OF BEING

TVyTANY and wide-branched are the results
J-^-^ that flow from the anthropomorphizing
by man of other objedls in nature, from the
transference to them, in thought, of person-
aHty with all its qualities, and from the con-
ception that unseen and intangible, yet in
efFedt substantial, beings exist "free" in the
universe. Among the most interesting results
are those that issue as almost a necessary
consequence of this estimate of things —
interchange of form and mode of being.
Indeed, this lies on the very surface of the
conception, although its logical relationship
does not seem to have been pointed out.

If man, stones, trees, plants, animals, spirits,
and gods are all in the same scale of existence,
why should they not exchange forms, undergo
metamorphosis? Why should not the soul of
a man enter the body of a being in what we
regard as a different scale of existence and

119

I20 ANIMISM

animate it either in play or in earnest, volun-
tarily or under stress of superior power exerted
by some other superior in the necessary
amount or quality of force, and do this either
temporarily or permanently? What is to
hinder, for example, man's becoming an animal,
especially if he does not distinguish between
his own being and that of an animal?* Or,
on the contrary, why should not animals
become men? And why should not countless
changes take place among other grades of
existence ? In faft, according to savage man's
account of things, all this does occur. Body
and soul, we have seen, constitute a duality,
in which, in the stage of thought we are
examining, the soul is, so to speak, a free
partner, able to take its flight and often to
return and resume its normal adlivities in its
own abode. It is the "separable" fador,
with a life all its own, the seat of impulse, will,
passion, and desire. We have, therefore, now
to develop the fadl of the easy passage from
what modern man would regard as one grade
of existence to another, either lower or higher,

• See above, p. 8, and cf. Rivers, Melanesian Society, i. 151 ff.,
where persons in Banks Islands are believed to be plants, animals,
etc., with appropriate taboos.

LOGICAL CONSEQUENCES 121

or the possession of qualities by one class of
beings which in a more sophisticated stage
of culture is considered the exclusive possession
of a different class.

Supernatural or semi-human beings are
conceived as having or assuming the form of
birds, animals, serpents, etc., in what we
might call their normal state, but by putting
off their covering of skin, feather, or scale may
assume the human form divine. Among illus-
trations of this occur with greatest frequency
the mouse, jackal, monkey, dove, and tortoise.*
Obassi Osaw, one of the two great beings
worshipped by the Etoi of Africa, was origin-
ally a man and a chief.' In the Oceanican
mythology the firemaking gods appear to
have the form of birds.* Maui, the Polynesian
hero, was able to assume the form of animal,
bird, or insect, and Rupe, another being in
the same cycle of stories, changes himself into
a bird.* Among the Ainus a goddess may

' Parker, Fillage Folk Tales, pp. 308 ff.; Frere, Old Deccan
Days, pp. 183, 193; Stokes, /mijaw Fairy Tales, pp. 41 ff.; Swyn-
nerton, Indian Nights Entertainment, p. 344; Natesu Sestri,
Madana Kama Raja, pp. 56, S7-

« Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 183, 184.

' Westervelt, Legends of Maui, passim.

• lb., pp. II, 20, 24, 38, 114, 125-126.

122 ANIMISM

become a flower, a woman, or a frog.® Refer-
ence may be made in passing to the gods of
Egypt, with their composite make-up of bird,
reptile, or beast and man. There seems to be
good 'reason for holding that this composite
form is not original, and that the partly
human form is the result of the refining
influence of culture. Originally, it seems,
the forms were those of birds, beasts, etc.
Certainly the explanation given that the gods
were once in human form and that, hard
pressed by their enemies, they took the form
of beasts in order to deceive or elude their
oppressors, is purely animistic and in accord
with the principle under exposition.

The cases where superhuman beings take
human form are innumerable, apart altogether
from the usual course of anthropomorphization
of the gods. In the Old Testament the
appearances to Adam, Abram, Lot, Gideon,
and Manoah occur to the mind at once.^ In
"Hordedef's Tale" four female deities and
one male god assume human shape.*

This being so, it is not at all wonderful

• Batchelor, Ainu, pp. 26, 262-263.

'Gen. 3:8; 18: 2ff.; 19: i ff.; Judges 6: 12; 13:3, 9, etc.

' Petrie, Egyptian Tales, i. 33 ff.

LOGICAL CONSEQUENCES 123

that mating takes place between these different
orders and that offspring partaking of the
qualities of both are produced.' Especially
do superhuman beings mate with humans,
earth- and heaven-born beings marry. Out-
side the mythology of classical Greece detailing
the amours of the Olympians of both sexes
from Zeus down, one may recall the union
of the "sons of God" and the daughters of
men; the numerous cases in the poems of
Homer, Pindar, and Vergil where the heroes
boast a mingled ancestry partly divine; the
many tribes whose eponym is a being semi-
divine, such as the Koyis of India, who trace
their origin to the union of Bhima and a wild
woman; and the beautiful story of Ono
(which is typical of several cycles of tales),
who greatly longed for his ideal of feminine
beauty. She finally appeared and became his
wife. With the birth of their son there
appeared also in the neighborhood a dog
which became intensely hostile to Ono's wife.
One day the animal attacked her with unusual
fury; then in uncontrollable fear she resumed
her former shape as a fox, leaped the fence,
and disappeared. In this case the myth has

' Rivers, Melanesian Society, i. 25-26.

124 ANIMISM

a rather uncertain meaning: some construe
it as indicating that a fox had assumed the
form of a woman; another and more probable
reading is that we have to do here with a sort
of genie in animal shape; a third interpretation
is that the fox shape was assumed for escape.
The second rendering or the first accords with
the hostility of the dog, which recognized
his enemy though in another (human) form.^"
With the prevalence of such views as these
it is not strange that the origin of children is
often sought not in the sexual ad but in some
chance affair, and that "miraculous" con-
ception or even the virgin birth is no stranger
in popular beliefs." It must be remembered,
in considering this particularly errant idea,
that nine months elapse between conception
and birth, and a considerable number of weeks
between conception and the knowledge that
a new life has begun. The idea is therefore
not surprising to one who realizes how aberrant
is savage reasoning in tracing cause and
efFedl. And when to this added the conserva-

"" Gen. 6: 1-4; Thurston, Omens and Superstition!, p. 78;
Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, p. 340; J. C. Berry, in Blakes-
lee, "Japan and Japanese- American Relations, p. 139.

" Milloue, in Revue de I'histoire de la religion, xlix (1904),
34-47-

LOGICAL CONSEQUENCES 125

tism of the primitive thinker, the tenacity with
which he holds to notions that have once
gained entrance, the fear of letting go of these
notions and of admitting that what has been
his faith is mistaken, we may begin to reaUze
how such beUefs, once entertained, persist.
Thus, in the New Hebrides "women sometimes
have a notion that the origin, the beginning,
of one of their children is a cocoanut, or a
breadfruit."" Mr. Frazer points out what is
indicated above, that the connexion between
sexual intercourse and conception is unknown.^*
To the more sophisticated, indeed, this error
seems not only impossible but literally ridicu-
lous. Mr. Frazer goes on to show that at
the moment when life is first perceived the
mother may be intensely observant of some
natural objedt, and ^through the ideas of
interpenetration of spirit to be dealt with
later^ she supposes being or power to have
passed from the objedt, entered her body, and
produced the efFedt she feels. Consequently
"she might imagine that the spirit of a
kangaroo, of grass-seed, of water, or of a
gum-tree (or of any other objedl) had passed
into her, and accordingly that her child . . .

" Codrington, JAI, xviil. 310-311. " FS, Sept. 1905-

126 ANIMISM

was really a kangaroo . . . though to the
bodily eye it presented the outward form of a
human being." Mr. Todd has also registered
the fad" that conception is ascribed to various
objeds, animate and inanimate. Among
American Indians rain falling on a maiden's
navel induces conception.^^ And among the
Nigerian peoples a child may come into being
through incarnation of a human spirit or by
the entrance into the mother of tree-spirits.^'

If human beings can arise from sources
such as these, it will not come as a surprise if
we find that whole tribes trace descent from
animals or plants, or make alliances with
them. This, however, raises the large question
of totemism, which can not be treated here.
Mention is made of the subjed in order to
avoid the appearance of overlooking this very
important phase or consequence of animistic
thinking. The single example may be noted
here of the Etoi of Africa, who hold the crab
to have been grandfather to a tribe.^^

One of the important results of this mode of
thought is the belief that men, either volun-

" Todd, Primitive Family, pp. 70 ff.

'^ Fewkes, American Ethnology, 28th Report, pp. 44, 48, 65, etc.

" Thomas, Anthropological Report, p. 31.

" Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, p. 196.

LOGICAL CONSEQUENCES 127

tanly or under force majeure exercised by
sorcerer or witch, pass from the human to
the brute form of Hfe. Among the con-
comitants of the belief in witches existent as
late as in the eighteenth century and so
balefully dominant during the Middle Ages,
in Europe, were the notion of were-wolves
and the idea that witches took the forms of
cats, hares, or bats. Many are the tales of
deadly destruction wrought by fiendish humans
who, to sate a gluttony for blood or for revenge,
transformed themselves into wolves and per-
formed wolfish deeds. Equally well-known
are the tales, not told as mere fidlion but held
as truth, of the conversion, as by Circe in the
Odyssey, of men into beasts, or, as in the
Arabian Nights, into stones or other forms of
non-human being. A few cases only will be
cited here of the -persistence of such beliefs
among primitive races of the present. Par-
ticularly in Africa is this idea widely diffused.
The leopard-man is as real to the people of
West Africa as was the were-wolf to the
European peasant of the fifteenth century.
This leopard-man assumes at pleasure the
form of the animal from which he takes his
name, preying on strangers or on his own

128 ANIMISM

people.^* The Fangs hold that under the
rfiagic of an enemy they may be changed into
monkeys." In Oceanica Maui transforms an
enemy into a dog.*"* Among the Dyaks a man
may be suspedled of changing himself into a
tiger, and is immune to ordinary methods of
punishment. Only strong medicine is equal
to the task of discipline.^' In other parts of
Malaysia also men transform themselves into
tigers or into fishes, and a woman becomes an
ape.^^ In India it would seem as if there were
hardly any animal shape which may not be-
come the refuge of man or the means of his
working evil deeds.'" In other words, as the
gods of Egypt were regarded as abandoning
in part their own shape and taking that of
animals, birds, or reptiles, so human beings
could put on the forms or grades of life of lower
animals (as we regard them and primitive
peoples did not).^*

" Milligan, Fetish Folk, p. 33; Talbot, In the Shadow of the
Bush, pp. 71, 82, 191-19S, 247-254, and chap. VII.

" Milligan, pp. 123-124.

'" Westervelt, Legends of Maui, p. 80.

" Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, pp. 265-278.

^ Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 162; Cox, Folk-lore, chap. II.

" Thurston, Omens and Superstitions, p. 260, et passim.

" Interesting reading on this whole subjeft of metamorphosis
will be found in Lang's Myth, Ritual and Religion, chap. IV.

LOGICAL CONSEQUENCES 129

One may go still farther and find humans
transforming themselves into inanimate
objedls. So the Basques have a story of a
witch who determined to drown the crew of a
fishing boat. The boat was to meet three
waves, the first and second of which the boat
might ride, but the third, which would be the
witch herself, would overwhelm the boat and
its crew. But the cabin boy overheard the
plot and the means of foiling it also came to
him, so he launched a harpoon into the heart
of the third wave, which divided and dashed
on the shore, a mass of bloody foam. On the
captain's return, he found his wife dying of
her wound. ^^

Sometimes, before power can be obtained
to efFedt these transformations, either on self
or on another, some magical rite or process
must be performed or undergone, or some
chance happening must have been encountered.
In the Far East a common belief is that an
animal that has drunk water which has lain
for twenty years in a human skull acquires
power to assume the human form at will."*
This is alleged to have been the case of a vixen

2' Vinson, Le Folk-lore du Pays Basque, p. 20.

"• C. T. CoUyer, in Baltimore Christian Advocate, 0&. 23, igiS-

130 ANIMISM

in China, who became a woman, the "Cleo-
patra of the East," and this transformation
led to the founding of the first kingdom in
Korea.

If the higher ranks of life might be changed
into lower grades, the reverse process was
equally possible. It is established that in
Egypt the pradlice was prevalent which until
recent times was current throughout Africa of
sacrificing attendants upon the death of a
chief that their souls might serve his in the
spirit world. But the softening eiFeds of
culture in the Nile land refined away in early
historic times this cruel custom. The problem
remained — hov^J^rovide service for the dead
nobles and chiefs? The difficulty was sur-
mounted by magic. Images of clay and
pottery were created and placed in the tomb,
and these, by utterance of the magic formula,
were animated in the spirit world as attendants
of the deceased. These little figures, called
ushabtiu, are found literally by hundreds in
the tombs of Egypt. There is reason to
believe that the same principle was employed
in Korea, Japan, China, and Mongolia. There
at the tombs are often found, in clay, wood,
and stone, effigies of attendants and of various

LOGICAL CONSEQUENCES 131

animals. The most reasonable explanation of
these, which is borne out by explanations
given to the writer by Koreans, is that these
were supposed to be animated in the spirit
world to do the will of the deceased nobles
or rulers at whose tombs they were placed.
Confirmation of this is found in the Nihongi
(one of the books of Japan coming nearest in
estimation to that we render to our Scrip-
tures), where the book professes to give an
account of events occurring 2 B.C.-3 a.d.
The story narrates the burial up to the neck
of the personal attendants of a deceased
brother of the mikado, this being the method
of execution in such cases. But the laments
of the vidlims so affedled the mikado that when
the empress died, clay figures were substituted.
The dating of this event is probably wrong,
since at the funeral of an empress in 247 a.d.,
sacrifice of attendants was still in vogue.*"

" Aston, Shinto, pp. 56-58; Underwood, Religions of Eastern
Asia, pp. 89-90.

IX

DEATH NOT ALWAYS REGARDED
AS INEVITABLE

IX

DEATH NOT ALWAYS REGARDED
AS INEVITABLE

\ FACT that has been before us inci-
-^^^ dentally, though not the subjedt of
specific remark, is the age-long belief in the
continued existence of the soul. We have
noted that the soul is "the separable fadtor"
in man's duality, "with a life all its own."
It would be normal then next to examine this
continuance of life beyond death, to determine
its charadler. But before discussing primitive
conceptions concerning the dead, their state :|
and powers, it is important to note that there
are hints from widely separated regions which
suggest that once there was a belief nearly or
quite universal that death is not inevitable.
It is likely that in the youth of the race, death
was praAically always the result of violence —
from man or beast — or of accident. And it
follows from what we have just noticed of the
parity of being and the attribution of hfe to

I3S

136 ANIMISM

insensate objedls, that even accidents would not
be recognized as such but would be interpreted
as the result of purposive adlivities. Moreover,
evidence is abundant that, in a somewhat ad-
vanced stage of human history, man was a con-
temporary of huge and ferocious animals which
have become extindt. While cave deposits re-
veal that he knew how to master some of
these, on the other hand it must be conceded
that cave men must often have succumbed, if
all did not eventually lose their lives, to the
attacks or have come off second best in the
encounters which they themselves brought on.
The increase in the numbers of human beings
is always attended by the mastery and ex-
tindlion of beasts of prey. In the days when
men were few and beasts were present in
numbers now hardly conceivable, the number
of casualties to men either in the hunt or
when themselves hunted must have been
great. We have to take into account also
feuds among men in the undisciplined state.
When thestage of culture was low, feudsbetween
tribes and clans, which, be it remembered,
were small in those days, were often waged to
extindion. Within the memory of man the
sparseness of population in Australia has been

DEATH NOT INEVITABLE 137

with high probabiHty of corredtness ascribed
to the feuds which for a single reason raged
between different tribes. The mortaHty from
this cause must have been great. And how
complete may have been the slaughter in such
cases is seen when we remember that so late
as the time of Samuel a numerous people was
devoted to extindlion in the name of religion
— in this case religion being the mask for
human animosities.^ Under circumstances
perhaps more numerous than we can imagine,
men, women, and children were slaughtered
to the last individual.

From what has preceded in the way of
showing early man's conceptions of the potency
of things about him, what would now be
regarded as accident was by him regarded as
the result of purposive adlion by the objedts
which seemed to work disaster. If a limb
fell from a tree in a storm and killed a man,
the explanation was that the tree had cast its
weapon in anger, or the wind had, with intent,
flung this missile with deadly aim. Stories
have passed in recent times of African tribes
that hewed down and chopped to bits a tree,
a limb from which had caused the death of one
1 I Sam. ij.

138 ANIMISM

of their number. Similarly, if a man were
drowned by river or ocean, it was the angry
flood or the offended sea which had removed
from this life the deceased human.

Recalling once more the steadfastness with
which man holds to convidtions once enter-
tained, remembering that the new has always
had to fight, and fight hard, for entrance into
his mind, we may regard the instances to be
adduced in which the belief that death is
always an ah extra event, to be accounted for
by causes other than "natural," as illustrative
of and probably presumptive of the existence
of the same belief in much wider circles than
those in which it now obtains. It is best
accounted for as a "superstition," i.e., as
"something left over from earlier times." To
be sure, in some cases, perhaps in all, the
belief has taken on the complexion of a more
advanced culture, it explains the death by
"spiritual" means instead of by mere brute
or physical force. This is a way that super-
stitions have. They fit themselves to the
environment, mental or physical, which has
wrapped itself about them.

From Australia quite concordant testimony
from competent observers is accessible. Thus

DEATH NOT INEVITABLE 139

R. B. Smyth cites the statement of Mr. Daniel
Bunce (curator of the Botanical Gardens at
Geelong), a man well acquainted with the
blacks, to the efFedl that "no tribe he has ever
met with believe in the possibility of a man's
dying a natural death. If a man is taken ill,
it is at once assumed that some member of a
hostile tribe has stolen some of his hair. This
is quite enough to cause serious illness. If
the man continues sick and gets worse, it is
assumed that the hair has been burned by
his enemy. Such an adt, they say, is sufficient
to imperil his life. If the man dies, it is
assumed that the thief has choked his vicflim
and taken away his kidney fat."

Mr. Smyth continues: "Mr. John Green
says that the men of the Yarrow tribe firmly
believe that no one ever dies a natural death.
A man or a woman dies because of the wicked
arts practised by some member of a hostile
tribe." 2

In Appendix 3 to the same work (ii. 289-
290) Albert A. C. Le Souef accounts for the
paucity of population in part by the fadl that
a death by disease involves the death of others,
because the first case was believed to be

^ Aborigines of Vidoria, i. no.

I40 ANIMISM

caused by sorcery, and a murdering expedition
is at once carried out for vengeance. (This
in turn starts a blood feud, and so on.)

Taplin remarks of the Narrinyeri: "When
a man dies they conclude at once that sorcery
has been the cause of the mournful event, and
that either ngadhungi or millin [|two methods
of sorcery]] have been pradlised against him." '

Spencer and Gillen testify that "no such
thing as natural death is realized by the
native; a man who dies has of necessity been
killed by some other man, or perhaps even by
a woman."*

Dawson's affirmation is quite concordant:
"Natural deaths are generally — but not
always — attributed to the malevolence and
the spells of an enemy belonging to another
tribe." «

In New Guinea the same belief holds, as
witnessed by Newton.

"About Wedau and Wamira the spirits of
the dead go eventually to some place to
the eastward of Cape Frere, in a valley in the
mountains called lola, the approach to the

' Narrinyeri, in Native Tribes of South Australia, p. 19.
* Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 48.
' Dawson, Australian Aborigines, p. 63.

DEATH NOT INEVITABLE 141

abode of the spirits being through a hole
in the ground. When the spirit arrives it
is questioned at once, 'Where have you come
from?' 'What have you come for?' just as
every time you go into a village every one
who meets you asks you (these questions).
The newly arrived one says, 'I have come
from Wedau' or 'Wamira,' as the case may
be, or the answer may state more explicitly
the sedtion of the village, and 'Where else
should I go except to my own people?' Then
the question is asked, 'Who sent you?' and
for answer the name of some sorcerer or
witch is given, the one responsible for the
death.""

Indirect testimony is furnished by Neuhass
to the same effedt for German New Guinea,
whose people separate souls with reference to
post mortem continuance according as they
died by the sword or by magic — the two
methods which they recognize of passing from
this life. The Mafulu of this island regard a
death otherwise unaccounted for as due to
spirits adting under sorcerers. An exception
is conceived, however, in the case of very old
persons, which seems to show the transition

° In Far New Guinea, p. 219.

142 ANIMISM

to a more advanced knowledge.'' And in
Hood Peninsula, British New Guinea, death
is the result of the adtivities of spirits or
magicians.^ Gomes asserts that in Borneo
all sickness (and therefore death not otherwise
accounted for) by external means is caused
by spirit possession.' Among Melanesians :
"It must ... be remembered that . . . death
is not admitted to occur without some obvious
cause such as a spear thrust. Therefore when
vigorous and adtive members of the com-
munity die, it becomes necessary to explain
their fate, and such deaths are firmly believed
to be produced by sorcery." ^° In far away
Africa "nearly all diseases, bad luck, mis-
fortune, sorrow, and death are caused by
witchcraft, i.e., by some one using a fetish to
curse a person.""

Among the Indians of Guiana, "Every
death, every illness, is regarded not as the
result of natural law, but as the work of a
kenaima (i.e., a man possessed by a spirit for
the purpose of blood revenge, and able to

' Williamson, Ways of South Sea Savage, p. 286.
8 jf^/.xxviii (1899), 216 fF.
' Sea Dyaks of Borneo, p. 183.
"• Seligmann, Melanesians, p. 279.
" Weeks, Primitive Bakongo, p. 219.

DEATH NOT INEVITABLE 143

send his spirit forth to inflidl evil). Such a
kenaima is . . . the real or supposed cause of
almost every evil, and especially of every
death." ^^

Concordant testimony is given by Brett: ^*
"A person dies — and it is supposed that an
enemy has secured the agency of an evil spirit
to compass his death." A sorcerer is em-
ployed to discover the guilty individual, and
a relative of the deceased is charged with the
work of vengeance. He is a kenaima, pos-
sessed by the spirit of destruction.

It is the "left-overs" that often reveal to
the discriminating observer the conditions
which are implied, which surrounded the full
bloom of what have become survivals. It is
not difiicult to imagine, and it is in accord
with primitive psychology to presume, that
the few cases here brought together, which
might conceivably be much extended by
definite research, suppose a much larger area
over which such ideas were regnant.

^ Im Thum, Among the Indians of Guiana, p. 329.
" Indian Tribes of Guiana, pp. 357 ff.

X

THE CONTINUED EXISTENCE
OF THE SOUL

X

THE CONTINUED EXISTENCE
OF THE SOUL

"l^THILE according to the fadts adduced
'^ " in the last chapter it is clear that a
belief has existed that man might, were it not
for accident or the like, continue to live on as
a duality in this present life, the fadt of death
stared men in the face, and with equal in-
tensity the belief was held that in death man
did not cease to exist, but that the soul lived
on. That the appearance of the deceased in
dreams had no small part in the foundation of
this belief seems almost certain. We have
already seen ^ that dreams were regarded not
as phantasies but as realities, and so the dead
who were seen in the dream state were re-
garded as souls of the deceased appearing to
the living. And other lines of evidence no
doubt seemed to open to primitive man. At
any rate, the fadt of this belief, at least as far
back as neolithic times, is evinced by the

* Above, pp. 23 ff.
147

148 ANIMISM

burial with the dead of utensils evidently
meant for the service of the deceased in the
land where he found himself after death.
This faith is shown also by the adts of devotion
or worship to the departed spirit, and by
material provision of food and other comforts
for the soul either at the grave or elsewhere.''
Similarly evidential are the means taken to
facilitate the soul's exit by door, window, or
roof, even through holes made in the wall of
house or tent; and the same value attaches
to the evident effort to prevent the soul's
return by carrying the corpse, to which it is
supposed fondly to cling, by devious ways to
its last resting place. Like conclusions are
forced by the feasts and celebrations on
anniversaries of death or burial, which attest
not only aflFedlionate remembrance, but first
and principally belief in the soul's continuance.
This belief in the soul's continuance is perhaps

'' Graves of Greeks and Romans have been found where per-
manent conduits in the grave mounds permitted the passage of
liquids and viands to the corpse — cf. Frazer's Pausanias, X.
4: 7, and the editor's comment on the passage; and the same
is true of graves in Mongolia, though in this case the evident
purpose was not the entry of food but the exit of the ghost, as
the openings are at the side of the tomb — cf. Geographical
Magazine, May, 1913, p. 651.

EXISTENCE OF THE SOUL 149

the most momentous and the choicest, as well
as the oldest, that animistic races have left
to us. The clear beginning of the doArine so
prized in all religions save Gautama's, viz.,
that concerning the immortality of the soul,
is here in its embryonic stage. We have
already noted that one means, perhaps the
chief one, to the acquisition of this idea was
the appearance of the dead in dreams. The
deceased, so the conclusion ran, was not dead,
he still existed, and in his own form. It may
be remarked, en passant, that if religion
inheres at all in this belief, then religion is
everyvphere existent; for no race has yet been
discovered which had not faith in the con-
tinuance of life beyond the grave. Once more,
if religion inheres not in belief but in the
practices to which belief gives rise, then in
the care for the well-being of the soul of one
that has passed, so widely prevalent, religion
is no less shown to be universal.

To suppose, however, that the content of
the primitive idea is that of full-fledged
immortality or unending existence would be
a serious misunderstanding. The conception
of deathlessness in its absolute sense is prob-
ably never present among savages. Primitive

I50 ANIMISM

philosophy does not sound so profound depths.
Hence, because "immortality" says more
than is contained in the savage's concepts of
future life, the word "continuance" has been
employed to express the notion found among
the uncivilized. On the other hand, one must
be on his guard when it is affirmed that
savages have no idea of immortality. In the
strid; sense this is true, but only in so far as
uncultured peoples have not reached any
conception which at all approaches that of
endlessness. They have no enduring records.
Oral tradition, which may easily become
confused and dim, carries them back only a
few generations — four or five, say. So the
notion of the soul life may be either indefinite
— or rather, undefined — or may be regarded
as limited to a certain number, greater or less,
of lives like that already passed. Indeed, the
life may have degrees, so to speak. Thus
the African Etoi and Bakongo believe that
"though ghosts have died once, they can die
a second time, and so become more dead than
before."^ Among the Haida a war party is
always accompanied by a shaman, among

' Talbot, In the Shadow o{ the Bush, pp. 8, 24, etc.; Weeks,
Primitive Bakongo, pp. 223-224, 243-244.

EXISTENCE OF THE SOUL 151

whose duties is to kill the souls of the enemy.^
In Fiji the natives believe that there is a
certain Samu Yale ("killer of souls") who
haunts the path to the realm of the dead, and
when a ghost comes along rushes out to kill it
with an ax unless it succeeds in escaping.
Another Fijian monster lies in wait and kills
the souls of bachelors, so that they never
reach heaven. In the same islands a ghost
that is troublesome to the living may have
his case settled by his unconditional demise.^
That mortals may die again seems reasonable
if only it be remembered that even gods grow
old and die, according to "the cultured
Egyptians." "Very aged was Ra, and the
saliva ran down from his mouth and fell upon
the earth " — a perfedl pidlure of senility.^
Heiti-eibib, a Hottentot hero-god, had the
habit of dying.'' In Polynesia Maui's wife
used also to kill the gods.^

* Swanton, Jesup North Pacific Expedition, i. 40-51, cited by
Halliday, Greek Divination, p. 95-

* Williams, Fiji, i. 244 ff.; Wilkes, U. S. Exploring Expedition,
iii. 85.

' ^ MuTTzy, Ancient Egyptian Legends, p. 81; cf. Wiedemann,
Religion of the Ancient Egyptians, pp. 54 ff.

' Hahn, Tsuni-Goam, pp. 56 ff.

8 Westervelt, Legends of Maui, p. 127.

XI

MODIFICATIONS OF THE IDEA
OF CONTINUANCE

XI

MODIFICATIONS OF THE IDEA
OF CONTINUANCE

'TpHE continuance of the human soul's
-*- Hfe is conditioned in various ways in
different regions and stages of culture. Some
tribes assign to souls a definite number of
■post-mortem lives, which number may, how-
ever, have stood for indefinite continuance,
being the tradition remaining from an earlier
stage when ability to count above a small
aggregate was uncommon. Thus Dyaks allot
to the soul seven lives, after which it is anni-
hilated.^ Or continuance may be not the
common fate, only that of a seledl few. The
basis of selection then naturally varies.^ It
may be that of descent or station in life. Thus
only chiefs survive in Fiji, and among the
Tongans of the South Sea Islands.' Or the

' Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, p. 208.
^ Carpenter, Comparative Religion, p. 232.
' Mariner, Natives of Tonga Islands, ii. 129 fF.
15s

IS6 ANIMISM

mode of death may have something to do
with it, as when New Guineans separate
souls according as they died by sword or by
magic — the two causes of death allowed to
exist by this people.^ Or (and this state of
affairs exists, almost certainly, only in a
somewhat advanced stage of culture) ethical
standards may be established, and future
life may be conditioned on compliance with
such standards in this life. Such an idea may
be found in a comparatively small area,
neighboring regions showing no knowledge
of such a test.^ On the other hand, it has
happened that while such standards ostensibly
exist, rriagical pradlices in effedt reduce the
test to its lowest terms or even to the vanish-
ing point. So with the "Negative Confession"
of Egypt. This is clear from its evident use
by practically every or any person, independent
of charader, who was by the formula of the
Book of the Dead primed to override or evade
obstacles to the passing of the soul to the
happy abode.* In parts of Melanesia the
ultimate death of the soul is maintained, its

* Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 149 iF.
' Codrington, Melanesians, pp. 274 ff.
« HR, March, 19 14.

MODIFICATIONS 157

survival seeming to depend on survival in
the memory of posterity.^

A different twist is given to the idea of
continuance when the notion takes either of
two somewhat closely related forms of expres-
sion, transformation or human reincarnation.
Transformation, or change of mode of ex-
istence on earth, we have seen to be a natural
consequence of that "parity of being" which
is the prime charadteristic of the animistic
manner of thought. Is there any reason,
a priori, why this should not operate when
the soul is discarnate, unfleshed ? As a matter
of fadt, the continuance of the soul in other
forms of existence than the human is a widely
diffused notion. Transmigration is not limited
to philosophic developments like Buddhism,
with its Jataka Tales of the 500 births of the
Buddha. Indeed, it is praftically certain that
the transmigration of philosophic India is one
of the noblest and most fruitful borrowings of
the Aryans from the Kolarian and Dravidian
aborigines. When these ■post-mortem trans-
formations take place, the continuance may
be indefinite or definitely limited. The Kai
of German New Guinea hold that ghosts are

' Seligmann, Melanesians, p. 192.

158 ANIMISM

changed first into some sort of game animals,
then into insedls, and then comes "the last
death." * This suggests the idea of a progres-
sive diminution of vitality or fading away
into nothingness, and may be a result of
observation of the fading memory of survivors.
In Melanesia, where ethical ideas condition
future life, after doing penance, the soul takes
the form of various animals, such as the
flying fox.' Transformation into an owl is a
frequent notion, as among the Arabs, and in
Madagascar among the Haida.^" One Cinga-
lese woman (who has been murdered) becomes
successively a turtle, a mango tree, a creeper,
and a blue lotus. Another changes into a
cobra." In the Solomon Islands ghosts are
incarnated in various animals, while among
the Melanesians men at death became sharks,
alligators, lizards, birds (the frigate bird par
excellence), snakes, and the like.^^ The rein-
carnation or appearance of the dead in the

" Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 150 ff.

' Brown, Melanesians, pp. 192 ff.

'» Doiitte, L'Jfrique du Nord, p. 361; Folk-lore, ii. 341; Swan-
ton, North Pacific Expedition, p. 27.

" Parker, Village Folk Tales of Ceylon, pp. 113 ff., 132.

" Williamson, South Sea Savage, p. 65; Codrington, Mela-
nesians, pp. 179 ff.

MODIFICATIONS 159

form of snakes is both common and ancient;
it is, of course, easily accounted for by the
frequency of the animal among graves, the
looseness of the earth and the crevices therein
making easy the formation of their burrows.
The reader of Homer and Vergil will recall
the pertinent cases there narrated, while the
vases and other monuments of art abundantly
illustrate the belief — although sometimes the
idea is modified by regarding the reptile as
the "genius" of the departed. The natural-
ness of the idea is attested by its occurrence
in regions as widely separated as New Guinea
and Colombia." Among the Mafulu of New
Guinea the ghost may be transformed into a
fungus living on the mountain." And among
the Narrinyeri of Australia rocks may be the
form taken by deceased ancestors.^'

Belief that the soul is reincarnated in
human posterity is so natural, once the idea

" Miss Harrison, Prolegomena and Themis, passim; Neuhass,
Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. Jisff.; Joyce, South American Arche-
ology, p. II.

" Williamson, South Sea Savage, p. 281.

^ Wood, Native Tribes of South Australia, p. 202. Other
cases in other parts of the world may be found in Decle, Three
Tears in Africa, p. 74; Das, Journey to Lhasa, pp. 56, l3iff->
138, etc.; Keller, Madagascar, p. 85; Folk-lore, ii. 437; Arctander,
Apostle of Alaska, p. lOJ.

i6o ANIMISM

of transmigration is entertained, that it can
not surprise us to find it widespread. When
we remember how feature and gesture of
infant or child may recall those of some
deceased member of the family, one fruitful
source of this idea may perhaps be disclosed.
For the notion is not the exclusive possession
of the philosophical, though we have stories
from Greece, where it was incorporated in
philosophical creeds, of men who recognized
votive offerings dedicated in a former exist-
ence, or find poets like Vergil recounting the
method of return and telling of the antecedent
draught from the waters of Lethe. So well
known is the belief that only a few typical
cases need be adduced from primitive examples.
Baganda women fear to pass places where
executions have taken place or spots alleged
to be haunted by dangerous ghosts, lest the
ghosts enter them to begin another earthly
life.'^ Similarly the Bakongo of the Congo
region hold firmly to the reincarnation of the
human spirit in human form." So usual a
happening is this among the Ibo of Nigeria

" Roscoe, The Baganda, pp. 20, 46, 124, et passim; cf. pp. 47,
289.

1' Weeks, Primitive Bakongo, p. iij.

MODIFICATIONS i6i

that, when a birth takes place, the dodor is
called in to decide which ancestor has come
back to earth. Indeed, an ancestor may
there scissate and become incarnate in more
than one descendant in any given generation.^*
The Kayans of Borneo also hold firmly to the
dodlrine, as do various tribes of Australian
Bushmen.^'

The same principle of parity of being permits
interchange and transformation, to which we
have become now so accustomed, to take place
in another direcftion. The ghost may be
changed into an evil spirit or demon or equally
repulsive form. A Cingalese spirit which had
temporarily left its body returned to find that
body untenantable and addressed his wife in
a dream. She supposed that he had become
a Yaka (evil spirit) and was correspondingly
terrified. Of course the wife's explanation to
herself of the dream is excellent evidence of
belief in the possibility and aduality of such
transformations.^" The Melanesian ghosts
may assume the form of compositely-shaped

^ Thomas, Anthropological Report, pp. 30-31.

" Hose and McDougall, Pagan Tribes, ii. 47; Spencer and
Gillen, Native Tribes, pp. iigfF., 335 fF., and Northern Tribes, pp.
145 ff., 33off., 448ff.

2" Parker, Fillage Folk Tales of Ceylon, p. 170.

i62 ANIMISM

demons. ^^ The souls of the dead may in some
cases become vampires and feed horribly on
the living — indeed this terrible habit may
have been formed before death. ^^ See also
below (Chap. XII) for other transformations.

'■'■ Codrington, Melanesians, pp. 258 ff.

^ Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 192-193.

XII

CONDITION OF THE DISCARNATE
SOUL

XII

CONDITION OF THE DISCARNATE
SOUL

SINCE evidence of the existence of the
belief that the soul lives on is so indubit-
able, the question arises — what is its condi-
tion ? In what state does the discarnate spirit
find itself after final separation from the body?
And first, as to what we may be allowed to
call, for want of a better term, its physical
condition.

We have already noted that soul is con-
ceived as having both form and substance, the
latter, so to speak, greatly rarefied. More-
over, it has been brought to our attention
that the most common idea concerning form
is that the soul is a replica of the body it
inhabited. Consistency in primitive thinking
is not to be assumed, as we have seen, nor are
logical processes among primitives quite the
same as ours. Yet when a disembodied soul
took up its ■post-mortem residence in a serpent,
for example, we may not suppose that that

i6s.

i66 ANIMISM

soul was still regarded as human in shape.
But so far as the author has discovered, no
decisive evidence exists on this point. The
probabilities favor greatly the supposition
that in such cases transformation of the soul
shape was supposed to have taken place.
Evidence of the common idea, retention by
the soul of its human shape, has been before
us. We have noted that some tribes mutilate
the body of the dead, thinking that by so doing
they inflidl like wounds upon the soul and
thus impose incapacity for harm upon the
ghost, the double of the body. The Omahas
slit the soles of a murdered man's feet that
his spirit may be unable to return and cause
damage to the people.^ Mangaeans prefer
death in battle — men are then in their full
strength; disease weakens them, and souls
have the nature of the body at death.
Barongo believe that souls are young or old,
according to the age at death, and so do the
Indians of Gran Chaco. Naga tribes of
Manipur think that ghosts bear whatever
tattoo marks, mutilations, or other blemishes
or embellishments occurred on the body.
Some people carry this idea so far as to prefer

' Fletcher and La Flesche, lyth Report, etc., p. 215.

1HE DISCARNATE SOUL 167

death before decay of natural powers sets in,
and so commit suicide or are buried alive,
that the soul may continue to exist in full
vigor.^

Having form and substance, the soul has
certain physical needs. It hungers, thirsts,
feels cold and heat. The degrees of grossness
of these wants vary greatly. Sometimes the
hunger, thirst, and wants and passions may be
appeased by the mere spirit or ghost of food,
drink, etc.; and the ghosts are served by the
spirits or (as our theosophical friends might
be imagined as saying) the astral bodies of
dishes, implements, or weapons which are
destroyed (i.e., killed) that their spirits may
accompany the ghost into the spirit land.
Indeed, this is by all odds the most prevalent
conception. Sometimes it is the more evanes-
cent or the more vital elements, such as the
blood, which are used by the ghost, as in the
celebrated case of Tiresias in the Odyssey.^
The cases already cited of food, drink, weapons,
utensils, and the like possessing souls and
being offered or placed with the dead, often-
times being broken or mutilated so as to "kill"

" Cases are cited in Frazer's Dying God, pp. 9-14.
3 Book XI.

i68 ANIMISM

them, furnish dlredl testimony to the supposed
needs of the ghost. The hunger felt by the
disembodied soul is vividly expressed by most
African tribes, whose belief is that ghosts can
and do eat even human bodies.* Ghosts also
suffer from cold, hence New Guineans, and
others, make fires at the graves, and even
build huts, so that when the ghosts come up
from the body they may find comfort.^

Ghosts have voices, too, but thin and
shadowy like themselves. They chirp like
crickets or utter their words in whistling tones.
So the wizards by ventriloquistic art impose
upon the credulous, and by wheezing utterance
produce the effeA of communications from a
shadowy being or from the ground. Note
the indications of shamanistic pradlice in
the Prophet Isaiah (8: 19; 29: 4).

What we may regard as the disposition of
the ghost is by most peoples held to be fixed
by the charafter of the person while on earth.

* Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 224-225, 232-233,
238, etc.; ERE, vi. 65 fF. The testimony is being exhaustively
coUedled in Frazer, Belief in Immortality — see the Index, under
"Food."

' Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians, pp. 442 ff.; Neuhass,
Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 518; Frazer, Belief in Immortality, i.
150-152.

THE DISCARNATE SOUL 169

Was he cruel, warlike, passionate, generous,
revengeful in the body, so will he be as a
discarnate ghost. So, for instance, the New
Guineans hold.^ Only account must be taken
of a very common notion, that the ghost is
endowed with increased powerJ One might
find many reasons for this common idea. The
general fearsomeness of the unknown and
invisible, the fad that the ghost has joined
the terrible host of free spirits, its very remote-
ness, combine to add the idea of power.
That which is distant in space or time gains
enchantment and enlargement from the im-
agination, which is the faculty most employed
in this sphere. Australians credit to their
ancestors deeds to themselves impossible,
though they are themselves their ancestors
reincarnate.* The greed and liking for pos-
sessions which existed on earth are attributed
in some parts to the spirit, and among the
Bakongo, for instance, this desire is satisfied
by placing all the deceased's wealth about
the grave.® The soul's assumed mobility,

° Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 142 ff.

' Roscoe, Baganda, pp. 282 fF.

' Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, pp. 489 S

» Weeks, Primitive Bakongo, p. 278.

I70 ANIMISM

such as was displayed in its power to leave
the body during life and to make investiga-
tions at even a considerable distance, is not
lost but rather enhanced. It has become a
free agent, no longer bound by the body's
necessities and limitations of locomotion, at
liberty to roam unfettered, to use in the wide
universe its powers — those that remain or
are acquired in its new condition. If it in
earthly life could leave the body temporarily
and like the lightning speed hither and thither,
now, disfleshed, its mobility has gained by
the change.

Especially is it believed that spirits acquire
a larger knowledge. Not only do they gain
a completer survey of the past and the present,
but a knowledge of the future becomes theirs.
According as their dispositions prompt, they
become helpers of their survivors or hostilely
adlive against them.

Particularly interesting in this connedlion
is the relationship of the ghost and other
beings to warning and predidtion. Among
the powers of the soul is that of return and
manifestation to survivors. Melanesian,
Andaman, and African ghosts, for instance,
reappear to and converse with their people

THE DISCARNATE SOUL 171

and become a medium of information.^" Par-
ticularly through dreams do they mediate —
a performance recorded in antiquity and
attested by present day belief over a large
area." Indeed, it is through the dream that
approach to human comprehension is most
easily made by divine, superhuman, or dis-
carnate powers, the spirit in this condition
being loosed from fleshly trammels. The
human spirit in sleep is regarded as not
bound by quite the same inflexible laws to the
bodily limitations. The employment of the
dream as a means of information or warning
at once occurs to the reader — Jacob, Joseph,
Pharaoh, Nebuchadrezzar; classical cases will
be found in Pindar, Olympiacs, XIII, 105,
and Pausanias, X, xxxiii, 11. It will be
remembered that in an earlier sedtion the
importance of the dream as an index to
animistic thought was dwelt upon at some
length. One specimen of developed classical
and philosophical thought on this has been
summarized from Jamblichus.

>" Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 190 ff.; Kloss, In the Andaman!,
p. 296; Weeks, Congo Cannibals, pp. 264-265.

" Herodotus, IV, 172; Pomponius Mela, I. viii. 8; Mauss,
Origines des pouvoirs magiques, p. 15; Haddon, Anthropological
Essays, p. 179.

172 ANIMISM

"There is nothing unworthy of belief in
what you have been told concerning sleep and
the meaning of dreams. I will explain it
thus. The soul has a twofold life, a lower
and a higher. In sleep the soul is released
from the constraint of the body, and enters
as one emancipated on its divine life of in-
telligence. Then as the noble faculty which
beholds the objeAs that truly are, the objeds
in the world of intelligence, stirs within and
awakens to its power, who can be surprised
that the mind, which contains within itself
the principles of all that happens, should in
this, the state of liberation, discern the future
in those antecedent principles which will
make that future what it is to be? The
nobler part of the soul is thus united by
abstradlion to higher natures, and becomes a
participant in the wisdom and foreknowledge
of the gods. Recorded examples of this are
numerous and well authenticated; instances
too occur every day. Numbers of sick by
sleeping had their cure revealed to them in
dreams. Would not Alexander's army have
perished but for a dream in which Dionysius
pointed out the means of safety? Was not
the siege of Aphritis raised through a dream

THE DISCARNATE SOUL 173

sent by Jupiter Ammon to Lysander? 'The
night time of the body is the daytime of the
soul.'" ^^

The student of anthropology will at once
recognize here the advanced justification for
beliefs which go back very far for their origins.
But even in the advanced stage of thought
represented by Jamblichus there are present
elements that are duplicable today in the most
primitive regions.

Several doors open here to alluring bypaths
— to inspiration, predidlion, oracles, on the
one side, these presuming a favoring disposi-
tion on the part of the ghost; and, on the
other, to necromancy and the "black art" or
black magic, if the ghost or his control be evil.
Melanesians and Africans say that the soul
may return to seize and inspire the unconscious
shaman or prophet to pregnant utterance.^^
We have said "unconscious" — for it seems
pradlically established that, in the earlier
stages of culture, prediction and the delivery
of the oracle took place only when the medium
was in ecstasy. Vergil's description of the

" Theurgia or the Egyptian Mysteries, Part III, chap. vii.
" Codrington, Melanesians, pp. 218 ff.; Roscoe, Baganda,
p. 113.

174 ANIMISM

raging sybil will recur to the classical student."
Plato says that "inspired and true divination
is not attained to by anyone in his full senses,
but only when the power of thought is fettered
by sleep or disease, or some paroxysm of
frenzy. "^^ It is well known that the American
Indians regarded the simple or mentally
incompetent as peculiarly endowed and in
closer touch with the supernatural than those
possessed of all their mental powers. In the
Old Testament there is an unconscious testi-
mony to the veracity of many parts of the
narrative, guaranteed by psychological con-
clusions, in the facfl that the earlier phases of
prophecy and predidlion are described as
involving the ecstatic state or a condition of
unconsciousness. Such are the use of the
dream, the case of Balaam, the prophets
among whom Saul found himself, this form of
affedion being communicable or "catching"
— comjpare the "dancing mania" of the
middle ages — and Elisha, for whom music
was in at least one case a prerequisite to the
delivery of the oracle — the "hand of the
Lord" (2 Kings 3:15) being the Old Testament
expression for the modern psychological term
" Mneid, VI, 45 fF., -j-jS. ^ Timaus, 71.

THE DISCARNATE SOUL 175

"ecstasy" adopted from the Greek. So among
perhaps most primitive peoples, like the
Melanesians and Africans referred to above,
warnings from the supernatural and even
knowledge of other matters, as of charms,
are supposed to be received under such
conditions.^®

Ghosts do not figure merely as indicators of
coming events or as guardians against evil
fortune. Their larger capacity for acftion may
make them powerful intercessors with still
higher supernatural beings or spirits, through
shamans who control them or know them
intimately." Or their own success in their
earthly vocation makes them interested in
survivors who follow their trade. In Africa
the spirit of a dead hunter is powerful to help
in the chase, and is propitiated to that end.^^
In Melanesia the help of ghosts in securing
the right kind of weather, in performing feats
of healing, in success with the fishing net or
line, and in agriculture is obtained by sacrifices

" So the Australians: Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 435-437.
On the fafts at large cf. Carpenter, Comparative Religion, pp. 181-
182.

" Carruthers, Unknown Mongolia, I. 243.

" Weeks, Primitive Bakongo, pp. 181-183.

176 ANIMISM

and offerings." Indeed, from the inhabitants
of Ghosttown may come some of the good
gifts, agricultural, for instance, which make
life worth living.^ The spirits of the dead may
keep a watchful eye upon survivors, preventing
or punishing infradlions of tribal customs that
involve offence to themselves, and warning
against repetition by inflidting sickness or
failure in various enterprises.^^ Foundation
sacrifice had the purpose of procuring for the
structure the protection of the spirits of the
dead.^'^

On the other hand, ghosts may be among
the spirits whose malevolence needs to be
guarded against. In fadl, among the post
mortem transformations may be that into ill
disposed spirits. Usually, when this is con-
ceived to be the case, the cause is found in
some misfortune in life or death. Among
the Ibo, for instance, a childless woman, a
wifeless or moneyless man, or a suicide may
as ghosts attempt to increase the population

'' Codrington, Melanesians, pp. 132 ff.: Lambert, Mceurs it
superstitions, pp. 24, 26, 218, 224 ff., 293 ff.; Turner, Samoa,
pp. 345 ff.

^ Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 238-239.

^^ Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 192, 310.

^ B. D. Eerdraans, in Expositor, Nov. 1913, p. 197.

THE DISCARNATE SOUL 177

the underworld by attacks upon those left
earth.^^ Similarly in New Guinea those

die in childbirth, suicides, and those who
re lost their heads become maleficent.^
e Omahas hold that ghosts of the murdered
urn and inflict punishment by disease, or

causing the wind to blow from hunter to
ne and so to spoil his sport. ^' Among
ngo cannibals the soul seen in dreams is a
ndering human spirit aiming at evil in its
vels, and the witch dodlor may be hired to
. it. The nostrils of the dead are plugged
nediately after death to keep the spirit in
i body as long as possible.^* If the ghost is

any reason unwelcome in the nether world

1 is driven out, it becomes malicious and
IS at mischief, either inflidling positive

by sending storms and like disasters or
venting success in various pursuits." In
le cases ghosts are normally neutral, and
ir disposition and consequent adtions de-
id upon the treatment they receive from

" Thomas, Anthropological Report, p. 31.

" Frazer, Belief in Immortality, i. 212.

« Fletcher and La Flesche, 27th Report, p. 215.

2» Weeks, Congo Cannibals, p. 262.

" lb., pp. 263-264, 269.

178 ANIMISM

the living.^^ So that the well-being of sur-
vivors depends on propitiation by gifts and
ceremonies or on manifestations of abiding
affedlion.^' The duties of classic Greeks and
Romans to their dead — careful and honorable
burial, celebration by games at the funeral
or on anniversaries — recur at once to the
mind: and in these and other matters these
peoples handed down in memory at least and
often in ritual the doings and beliefs of far
away ancestors. Close parallels to classic
customs have been observed among African,
Melanesian, and Polynesian peoples, where
not only is the funeral offering placed on the
ground, but dramatic performances in honor
of the dead take place.'" Among some races,
such as British New Guineans and the Mafulu,
ghosts are always malevolent.*^

Among the exercises of the enlarged powers

^ Williamson, South Sea Savage, pp. 65, 68, 74, 75, 76, 81 ff.;
Roscoe, Baganda, pp. 116, 278, 286.

^ Taplin, Narrinyeri, p. 19; Curr, Australian Race, i. 87;
Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 461, 463, 473; Spencer and Gillen,
Northern Tribes, p. 507, and Native Tribes, p. 511.

™ Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, p. 18; Brown, Melani-
sians and Polynesians, pp. 2146".; Milligan, Fetish Folk, pp. 233-
236.

SI Williamson, South Sea Savage, p. 281 and Mafulu Mountain
People, pp. 243 fF., 266 tF., 297 ff.; JAI, xxviii (1899), 216 ff.

THE DISCARNATE SOUL 179

attributed to ghosts by quite diverse peoples
is one which, as we shall see later, they possess
in common with non-human spirits. This is
the inflidlion of disease in an access of malig-
nancy. Such a belief is held by American
Indians, South Sea islanders, Hindus, New
Guineans, and many others.'^ They may in-
flidl lockjaw by a blow, cause death, induce
phthisis, and bring pestilence.^^ Shamans and
medicine men may use them to secure revenge
or haunt the living; and this again calls up the
need for exorcism.'* This gives rise to various
devices and taboos, aiming at propitiating or
deceiving the ghosts, such as change of names
assigned to things belonging to the dead, or
dropping out of the language words which
contained the name borne in life, this going
so far in some cases as to involve the destruc-
tion of huts, plantations, trees, and other
possessions.'^ It is quite in keeping with the

'2 Folk-lore, ii. 420 flF., 431; Kloss, In the Andamans, p. 305;
Decle, Three years in Savage Africa, pp. 236, 344.

'' Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, p. 230; Weeks, Congo
Cannibals, p. 266; Roscoe, Baganda, p. 100; Williamson, South
Sea Savage, pp. 81 ff.; Crooke, Tribes and Castes, iii. 436.

« Williamson, South Sea Savage, pp. 81 ff.; Roscoe, Baganda,

p. 126.

'' Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 631 ff.; Cambridge Anthropologi-
cal Expedition, v. 250.

i8o ANIMISM

whole conception of things that ghosts should
be especially dangerous at night.^*

From all this, to anticipate slightly what is
yet to come, fear of discarnate spirits may
lead to a cult, a worship, which is apotropaic,
deprecatory, or propitiatory in charadter. On
the other hand, the sense of favors received or
to come gives the rationale of a cultus which
embodies more of gratitude and pleasure than
of fear. With both these varieties of mental
qualities attributed to ghosts, shared by
them in common with non-human powers, it
seems to require somewhat of ingenuity and
a miscalculation or misappreciation of native
human traits to force one to derive all worship
from fear.'^ Timor fecit deos is now hardly
tenable in its original sense, in view of abun-
dance of ascertained fadts. Most of the ani-
mals, especially those domesticated, display
amiable traits, including gratitude. We can
hardly hold, therefore, that man, whether the
produdl of evolution or of special creation,
developed one of his noblest exercises, that
of worship, from a sense of fear alone.

» Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 64, 147.

" Chalmers and Gill, Work and Adventure, pp. 84 ff.

XIII
THE HOME OF THE SOUL

w

XIII
THE HOME OF THE SOUL

E have seen that to the discamate
spirit is attributed much of fondness
for things to which it had become accustomed
in its earthly Hfe. The idea of preference or
Hking comes out frequently in connection with
its post-mortem habitat. Of course, it is to be
remembered that the eschatology of primitive
peoples is vague and by no means consistent.
Indeed, when it is recalled that Christian
eschatology is still in a confused state, when
orthodox theologians are at odds as to the
location of the soul between death and the
judgment, even as to the time of the judgment,
whether immediately after death or at some
indefinitely distant time; when these dod:ors
of the faith disagree as to the conscious
existence or the "sleep" of the soul after
death, as to its removal to heaven or hell on
dissolution, and whether that heaven or hell
is final or only temporary — one can hardly

183

i84 ANIMISM

expedt primitive peoples, whose memory for
history is short and their outlook and forecast
vague and brief, to have a consecutive and
sharply defined eschatology. Consequently
we find variations innumerable in the concep-
tions of the soul's location, and a sort of
warfare between the poor ghost's supposed
preference and the desires of survivors.

It is quite normal that the spirit is credited
with lingering affedion for the home and the
environment that so long harbored it, and
makes the grave, which is, of course, in the
immediate neighborhood, its favorite haunt
and the body in the grave still its home.
How persistent this primitive notion is may
be verified in almost any rural community,
where few indeed care to pass God's acre
after dark without company. The prehistoric
Mycenaeans left in graves a groove by which
evidently to pour the offerings to the ghosts;
Egyptian tombs had channels by which ka
or ba could have access to and egress from
the embalmed body. Even in Mongolia these
apertures are found in the graves, though
there they are placed at the sides, showing
that they were intended for the spirit's exit
and entrance and not to facilitate the placing

THE HOME OF THE SOUL 185

of provisions — food and drink.* Many primi-
tive peoples entertain beliefs parallel to those
indicated by these customs. Such are African
tribes like the Baganda, certain Australians,
and many others.'^ From this conception
may arise the thought that souls wander
around their old haunts and even make them
impossible for dwellings, at least for a time;
or they may frequent places having peculiar
topographical features, where their clans fore-
gather.' Sometimes this return is only
temporary, limited to certain hours of the
night, as for example, the case of some African
ghosts, who are released between twelve and
three in the morning — remember the ghost
of Hamlet's father ! * In other cases there is
alleged to be a time when the ghosts must
quit finally their earthly haunts for a perma-
nent abode elsewhere. Thus in New Guinea
"it seems that the spirit does not find its way
at once to its home; but wanders for some

1 NGM, May 1913, p. 65.

' Roscoe, The Baganda, pp. 282 fF.; Howitt, Native Tribes
S. E. Australia, pp. 434, 438-439. 4SS. 47°; Talbot, In the
Shadow of the Bush, p. 232.

' Taplin, Narrinyeri, pp. 181 ff.; Thomas, Report, p. 38;
Williamson, South Sea Savage, p. 76; Spencer and Gillen, Native,
Tribes, pp. 123, 126.

* Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, p. 232.

i86 ANIMISM

time about the places it was familiar with
during the period it was conne(5led with the
body. It may be possible that the spirit does
not finally leave its own haunts until the
death feasts are finished, or at least that the
people believe the spirit may be about, and
likely to injure them, until they think a
sufficient time has elapsed, and a sufiicient
number of death feasts have been held, and
that then it is safe to close the series, to
remove the tabu, and to give over the mourn-
ing."^

There is, however, in this conception left
open the possibility of securing a brief visit
from them for purposes that are supposed to
serve the living. How easily out of this could
develop the idea and practice of necromancy!

On the other hand one may support with
abundant evidence the thesis that there is a
quite general consensus to the efi^edl that it is
unseemly for departed spirits to inhabit the
land where the living pass their earthly
existence. It is widely believed that ghosts
have their own land whither living mortals
may not go, whence, also, spirits may not

' Newton, In Far New Guinea, p. 220; cf. Neuhass, Deutsch
Neu-Guinea, iii. 149 ff.

THE HOME OF THE SOUL 187

usually return, unless under highly exceptional
circumstances. Still it must not be forgotten
that a whole group of festivals and a host of
folk customs, centering in mid-winter for the
most part, have as their basis the idea that
ghosts return annually and must be treated
with resped, kindness, and hospitality. All
Souls' Day is the survival in Christian custom
of this belief.^

To the questions where and what the region
of the dead is many tribes give various
answers. Naturally man's wildest flights of
imagination and fancy have played with this
theme. Of course, much depends, in the
answer that is given by any particular group
of peoples, upon the geography of the region
and the cosmography of the group. It is
most natural, from the usual custom of burial,
that a region beneath the earth should be in
the thoughts of very diverse tribes and nations.
There was placed the Babylonian "Land-
of-no-Return," for the most part the Egyptian
home of the dead, the Greek Hades, the
resting place of natives of Hood Peninsula
and other places in New Guinea, in Oceanica

^ For convenient coUedtions of cases, cf. Harrison, Prolegomena,
passim, and Miles, Christmas, pp. 161 fiF.

i88 ANIMISM

(Samoa) — to name only a few representative
peoples^ On the other hand, it frequently
happens that the place of souls is otherwise
located: on a distant mountain, as with some
natives of British New Guinea; * or where the
sun sets (compare Egyptian ideas); or on an
island far away;* or under the sea;^" or in the
heavens, either in some definitely designated
luminary or in some indefinite locality (Omahas
regard the Milky Way as the path to this
home by which spirits pass in turn to and
through seven spirit worlds)." At times the
information is quite definite, as for example in
parts of New Guinea.

"About Wedau and Wamira the spirits
of the dead go eventually to some place to
the eastward of Cape Frere, in a valley in
the mountains called lola, the approach to the
abode of the spirits being through a hole
in the ground. When the spirit arrives it
is questioned at once, 'Where have you come

' JAI, xxviii (1899), 216 fF.; Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea,
iii. 149 fF.; Westervelt, Legends of Maui, p. 129.

' Seligmann, Melanesians, p. 192.

' Westervelt, Legends of Maui, pp. 129 S.; CodnngXon, Melane-
sians, pp. 25s ff.; Frazer, Immortality, p. 192.

1° Lambert, Masurs et superstitions, pp. 13 fF.; Seligmann,
Melanesians, pp. 655 fF.; Turner, Samoa, pp. 257-258.

" Fletcher and La Flesche, 27th Report, etc., pp. 588-589.

THE HOME OF THE SOUL 189

from?' 'What have you come for?' just as
every time you go into a village every one
you meet asks you, 'Where are you going?'
'What are you after?' The newly arrived one
says, 'I have come from Wedau' or 'Wamira,'
as the case may be, or the answer may state
more explicitly the sedlion of the village, and
'Where else should I go except to my own
people?' Then the question is asked, 'Who
sent you?' and for answer the name of some
sorcerer or witch is given, the one responsible
for the death. The spirit is admitted to its
new home, where it finds feasting and danc-
ing, plenty of food, and apparently also some
fighting, and should the spirit be killed, as
some seem to think possible, during such fight-
ing, then it is the end, there is no more life
of such." 12

It would be expedted that ideas differ
greatly as to the charadter of the spirit world.
A wide group of unrelated peoples have looked
on the place of the soul as melancholy and
mournful, fitting the soul's unsubstantial char-
ader. The saying of Hezekiah, king of Israel,
after he had recovered from a dangerous
illness, here leaps into the mind:

^ Newton, In Far New Guinea, p. 219.

igo ANIMISM

"For the grave cannot -praise thee, death

cannot celebrate thee:
They that go down into the -pit cannot hope jor

thy truth.
The living, the living, he shall praise thee.
As I do this day."^'^

Such were the conceptions of Babylonians,
Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. A noted
Greek hero is made to declare that he would
rather be a lowly laborer on earth than have an
exalted station among the dead. Adversely
to this, not a few peoples patterned their
ideas of future life on the present world.
Such is the content of the notion in cases
already cited '* where primitive tribes mutilated
foes to prevent the shades from taking revenge
in the other world. And in many other
instances the imagination has compassed only
similar conceptions." The Thay of Indo-
China look on the next life as the counterpart
of this.^^ The African Bakongo bury their
dead late in the day so that the spirits may

" Isa. 38: 18-19.
" Above, pp. 166 fF.

^ Lambert, Mceurs et superstitions, pp. 13 fF.; Seligmann,
Melanesians, pp. 655 fF.; Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, p. 208.
" Anthropos, ii (1907), 619.

THE HOME OF THE SOUL 191

arrive when the ghosts who preceded the
present dead are home from their labor in
the fields and may welcome the newcomer."
Other Africans know of ghost towns where
the dead live and congregate as they did
while on earth. ^^ The Hausa ghosts have a
city of their own, which has at least once been
seen by a man who returned to tell the tale.
A traveler saw four caravans crossing the
desert in different directions, and followed
one which seemed to him best. Suddenly he
saw the ghost city in front of him, and in
seme way became cognizant of its nature.
He hurriedly turned about and escaped. This
was almost miraculous, for the spirits summon
travelers from a caravan, and he who follows
them to the ghost city never returns. ^^ The
ancient Egyptians conceived the land of the
departed and their life as duplicating under
happier conditions life on the Nile; indeed
there was a celestial Nile land, where the
social conditions which environed life on earth
continued, even to the institution of slavery
and subjedtion of the peasant to the noble.
And exadtly on a par with this state of ex-

" Weeks, Primitive Bakongo, p. 270.

" Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, -passim.

" Tremearne, Ban of the Bori, pp. 155-156.

192 ANIMISM

pedlation is the set of ideas regarding the
"other side" entertained by South Sea people.™
The custom in old Egypt, Japan, and else-
where, and in modern Africa, of slaughtering
wives, servants, slaves, and cattle to provide
a retinue and a living for the dead in the spirit
world is too well known to need substantiation
here. We have already had before us''^ the
curious custom of providing Ushabtiu in
Egypt, and have seen the record of the institu-
tion of a similar custom in Japan, while the
explanation given in China and Korea of the
figures around the grave-mounds in those
countries has also been cited. We have to
remember in taking note of these customs in
the Far East that the pradlice of magic there
has for ages been almost as common and as
inveterate as in Egypt.

We may further note that in parts of Fiji
and New Guinea the souls of the departed
are supposed to dwell in a great community,
and the puberty ceremonies are by some
construed as having reference to introdudion
to ancestral spirits in preparation for final
union with them.^^

™ Williamson, South Sea Savage, p. 75.

'' Above, pp. 130 ff.

^ Frazer, Belief in Immortality, i. 434.

THE HOME OF THE SOUL 193

n some regions the golden age of man is
:ed beyond the grave. Some British New
inea tribes think of the future life as a
adise, with no old age, sickness, crime,
iting, death, or evil spirits; where first
rriages are reestablished and children are
n who reach maturity and maintain that
idition with unabated strength and virility;
I so it is with other South Sea islanders.^
The means of approach to this final abode
ies, of course, with the grade of civilization,
location of the soul's home, and many
er circumstances usually dependent on
d conditions. If the home is on an island
across a river, a ferry may be conceived —
!S Melanesians reproduce in part the ideas
:he Greeks with their Charon and the Styx.^
lers conceive the entrance to be through
1-known caves or holes, and exploration
these by the reckless or foolhardy is dis-
iraged by the belief that attempts at
ranee will be punished by severe earth-
ikes.^^ Or a chasm is believed to separate

Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians, pp. 443 ff.; Frazer,
/ in Immortality, i. 192; Seligmann, Melanesians, p. 192.

Codrington, Melanesians, pp. 255 ff.

Newton, In Far New Guinea, p. 219; Turner, Samoa,
157-258.

194 ANIMISM

the two worlds, spanned by a tree trunk, as
among American Indians or some Melanesians
(the latter must carry the figure of a frigate
bird to ensure safe passage),^® or with a higher
development of culture the tree trunk becomes
a bridge, the chasm hell, and the passage the
trial of the soul.

While by far the preponderating belief
among primitive peoples is that the dead,
especially their ghosts, are to be gotten out of
the way, and while the general feeling is one
of fear, in occasional situations an enduring
connexion with them is desired, and especial
efforts are made to bring this about. Thus
some peoples in Africa, where nearly all
shades of primitive thought may be discovered,
are so anxious to secure this abiding presence
of their dead that they cut ofF the head of
the deceased and preserve it in the home.
This is thought to secure the continuance of
the presence of the favor of the dead patron,
as he now becomes by this means. ^'

^ Codrington, Melanesians, p. 257.
" Frobenius, Voice of Africa, p. 674.

XIV
DESCENSUS AVERNI

XIV

DESCENSUS AVERNI

' I ^HE notion of the underworld as a prison
-*- place in which the dead are confined
has given rise in many different centers to the
thought of some daring mortal who breaks the
law separating the two worlds, and visits
the home of the dead, winning through by
power of love, or sheer bravado and physical
might or challenge, or by favor of the gods.
The Descensus Averni is a widespread myth.
Its earliest literary form meets us in pre-
Semitic Babylonia in the story of Tammuz
and Ishtar — now so well known that no
extended narrative is here necessary.^ A fairly
close parallel to the Ishtar episode is found in
far-away Japan, where the goddess Izanami
died and her spouse Izanagi descended after
her, broke the taboo concerning preservation
of darkness (which is an element in so many
cycles of folklore unconnected with the Descen-

' For the story, see most conveniently Rogers, Cuneiform
Parallels, pp. 121-131.

197

198 ANIMISM

sus), and with difficulty escaped to the upper
air, pursued by the revengeful goddess and
her minions." The retirement of the love-
goddess Ishtar in Babylonia to the underworld
is also paralleled by that of the sun-goddess in
Japan, though it is "the rock-cave of heaven"
in which the latter hides herself, and so brings
darkness, as the absence of Ishtar brings lack
of desire, on earth.^ Hercules' famous exploit
of descending and haling Cerberus, the snake-
haired dog guardian of the shades who would
fain return, to the upper air is in keeping with
the hero's hardy and daring nature. The
Babylonians having conceived so early the
notion, it is not to be wondered at that the
Mandaeans, who took over so much of Baby-
lonian custom and mythology, should take
over in the descensus Averni the exploit of
Manda-da hayye.* Of course the VergiUan
story of jEneas' descent at once recurs to the
mind, as well as that of Vergil's imitator and
disciple Dante.

But the idea is not confined to peoples so
far along in culture. Maui, the culture hero
of New Zealand and the South Sea, made the
dread journey to meet his great ancestress —

» Aston, Shinto, p. 93. » lb., p. 100. « NSH., vii. 147.

DESCENSUS AVERNI 199

the lure here was merely material, a fish hook
and to get fire.^ The Etoi, a people of Africa,
know of the same venturous enterprise with
the taboo of eating ghost food, which connecfts
the story in thought, though hardly in origin,
with the Greek myth of the ravished Per-
sephone, and with a story of quite different
purport in Babylonia.* Among some New
Guinean peoples there are chosen mortals that
make the journey and return in safety."
Omaha Indians regard it as possible for the
living, in a swoon, to visit the dread regions
of the dead and return unscathed.* But these
are the exceptions, and only heroes and gods,
and even they under specially favoring aus-
pices, like the command, behest, or permission
of the chief god, visit the dead and are able to
reascend from "The Land of No-Return."

' Westervelt, Legends of Maui, pp. 23, 48, 68 ff.
' Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 240, 336.
' Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 655 ff.
' Fletcher and La Flesche, 2jth Report, etc., p. 589.

XV
WORSHIP

XV

WORSHIP

rOWEVER worship be defined, little
'- refledtion is needed to discern the basis
ts beginnings in what has preceded. Wor-
) implies in the worshiper fear, reverence,
titude, veneration, homage, love, resped,
liration, or a complex of some or all of
se; and in the objedl worshiped power,
th, or dignity, or a complex of them,
we moderns know it, and as the world has
wn it as far back as written traditions or
ains of various sorts permit investigation,
ship involves certain definite modes of
on by worshipers, diredled to or at the
;<3: of worship; and these modes of adtion
i to become stereotyped, or, to anticipate
ttle, to crystallize into ritual. And many
;ons lead to the belief that this stereotyping
an very early.

lan's conception of things being anthropo-
lic, he would regard them as he did men,
203

204 ANIMISM

and in addition he would treat them, so far
as circumstances and the nature of the case
permitted, much as he did men. Since he
\thought of them as having senses to be
tickled, appetites to be gratified, mentality to
be reckoned with, temper to be made or kept
placid and amicable, and power to be turned
to good account or at least to be prevented
from adling against him, he would deal with
them as his experience and observation had
taught him his own kind liked to be treated,
and thus secure his own well-being. It could
not have been long before the social element
entered, tradition as to methods of accom-
plishing ends soon becoming a determining
fadlor. Man had already discovered that
the individuals of his own species differed
greatly in qualities and power, and that
different modes of procedure were either
politic or necessary. Those weaker or less
cunning than himself he could either disregard
or render subservient. Those stronger and
more resourceful would evoke fear or win
respedl, and to them he would concede what
he must. The degree of respedt or fear, ex-
pressed in terms of tribute or homage, would
depend upon the conceived or adual disparity

WORSHIP 20S

between his powers and those of the others.
How short a distance separates respedl or
homage from worship becomes evident when
one considers the refinement in theology of
the distinction of dulia, hyperdulia, and latria
from each other, or when one notes the difii-
cuhy of distinguishing the results in the
objedlive adtions attending "veneration,"
"higher veneration," and "worship."^ This
same standard of adion would apply to what-
ever grade or order of beings man adlually
dealt with or conceived himself as dealing
with. As Professor King puts it:

"Granted that the idea of a superior per-
sonality once appears in the religious con-
sciousness, it is easy to see that the problem
of worship itself, and of different types of
worship, is quite a simple one. It seems
almost self-evident thatf the deity will be
approached and treated precisely along the
lines of intercourse within the group of wor-
shipers/hHe will be bargained with, or
treated with resped:, because he is recognized
as having the advantage in power. He will
be flattered, offered gifts, feasted, and treated
precisely as would occur in a human society

1 Cf. NSH., article "Dulia."

2o6 ANIMISM

if any member were felt to surpass the rest in
some important type of excellence. ( In general,
the modes of worship will be, first of all,
repetitions of the adls called forth by the
objedl ^ situation which has aroused the
interestQ In what better way could keepers
of flocks conceive of honoring their god and
keeping him interested in men than by the
ordinary communal feast, of recognized im-
portance in maintaining proper social relations
on the human side? (The peoples with whom
witchcraft is of dominating importance will
necessarily treat their deities after the manner
of treating the human sorcerer."^

The expression of animistic thought in this
relation is that what is pleasing to the wor-
shiper will be regarded as pleasing to the
objedb of devotion; what would effedl the
purpose in mind if applied to the subjeft is
considered eff"e(3:ual applied to the objedl.*

Most likely the impression upon man most
nearly (if not quite) universal made by any
given objedl was that of relative power.
The question that would then arise would be:
Is this being favorable to me or adverse?

' King, Development of Religion, p. 257.

• Cf. Carpenter, Comparative Religion, p. 14.

WORSHIP 207

Will it use its power to help or hinder or
injure? If the conception was that the objed
was propitious, gratitude, wanning in time
and with the supposed or real repetition of
favors (again real or supposed) into respedt,
love, and admiration, would evoke homage or
worship in its essential even though crude
elements. If the objedt was conceived to be
malign in disposition, the endeavor would
naturally follow either to overawe or to
propitiate. It would not take very long to
discern here how magic in some of its aspedts
could arise. Threat or magic would be em-
ployed, in course of time, to overawe; on the
other hand, blandishments of various sorts
would be used to conciliate; or apotropaic
performances might grow up to drive and
keep away the power conceived as hostile, to
prevent it from accomplishing ends unwelcome
to man. Variety in treatment must have
arisen from the supposition that there were
grades of being and differences of disposition
among these beings. Just as some men were
more powerful in physique or resourceful in
wiles, so with these other beings with whom
man supposed himself in contadt. That differ-
ent kinds of power were conceived as existing

2o8 ANIMISM

in the many spirits which man thought he
perceived in his world is in the very forefront
of the phenomena we have passed in review.

In what has preceded there is implicit an
assumption that is not difficult to establish.
This is that man's relation to beings other
than himself was to a large extent, if not
entirely, egoistic. He was concerned with
what contributed to his own well-being as he
understood it. Not overlooked here is the
later stage when gens and tribe have entered
with their idea of solidarity, in which the
individual was to a certain extent submerged
and so far extinguished. In this stage, indeed,
the adions of the one, under penalty of his
clan's displeasure or worse, were made to
contribute to the weal of the whole, or, at
the very least, to be devoid of harm or danger
to it. Prior to this grade of culture — if
psychology tell true its tale — the needs of
self alone furnished the criterion of adlion,
self including doubtless also family. And
when the individual self was merged in the
clan self, when the good of one was the good
of all, and vice versa, the test of egoism, though
now a better and larger quantity, still ruled.
Dealings with not-man, as with man, con-

WORSHIP 209

cerned the affairs of everyday life, were a
matter of barter and exchange between man
and the others. Two passages from the
Hebrew scriptures here leap into the mind.
Jacob (Gen. 28 : 20-22) promises devotion to
God on condition of receiving a certain con-
tinuing favor. The reverse of this pidure
appears in Deut. 28, where in return for
definite religious performance prosperity is
assured the people by their God. Philos-
tratus makes ApoUonius of Tyana declare
that worship and sacrifice and the like are but
a quid ■pro quo, human in its formulation.
Indeed, ApoUonius thought that large offerings
made before any benefit was received from
the god were suspicious, arguing guilt in the
sacrificer and an attempt at bribery of the
deity .^ Such a condition as the understanding
between mortal and deity, the driving of
bargain with the god, can be ascertained as
occurring all through history. Only late does
altruism appear and thenceforth struggle for
expression against odds.

Our chief concern here is to note the fadl
most pertinent to our line of investigation and
impHcit in the foregoing — that worship as
* Philostratus, Life of ApoUonius, i. x.

210 ANIMISM

registered by history and observation is most
easily accounted for on an animistic basis.
Worship, if our hypothesis be true, is but the
subHmation (at first only slight) of sentiments
that are wholly native to man's nature from
the start. The difference in degree or intensity
corresponds to the conceived difference in
certain qualities found in the objed. The
higher worthfulness or helpfulness or potency
found or conceived in an objedt commanded
that initial stage of tribute, higher than was
yielded to others, which developed in the course
of time — how limited or extended we cannot
tell — into what would now be conceded to be
essentially worship.

Incidentally in the preceding discussion the
fadt has come out that man worshiped what
we call inanimate objedts in nature (stones,
mountains, rivers, seas, the luminaries, the
sky, the earth, and the like); individuals-^
the vegetable kingdom (the sacred tree,~-fQr-
example, indigenous in nearly all lands but,
necessarily varying in species with the latitude
and longitude); others from the animal king£
dom (snakes and monkeys and what not);
imaginary beings good and bad, malign ana^
benign; as well as Hving men and the souls of

WORSHIP 211

the degartedfl We trace to animism the
varied cultFlKat have engaged the soul and
spirit of man throughout time and all over
the world. Idolatry in all its varieties and
in the numerous connotations of the word
needs little other explanation of its origin.
Worship springs out of man's nature along
with his efforts to satisfy his varied appetites
of soul and body, and is formulated on the
basis of his real or supposed experiences. To
use a word that sums up luminously the
entire situation, man is incorrigibly theo-
tropic, his thoughts have ever turned Godward.
The element that was lacking was judgment
of the things he chose as objedls of service,
perception of what was worthy of adoration,
realization of a true standard of values.

It is not our purpose to trace in minutiae
the development of cult. We are concerned
here solely with the phenomenology and
implications of animism, not with the unfolding
of all that results. It would indeed be inter-
esting to follow out the complexity of cult,
to show how it came to cover so large a portion
of life, unfolding into exadling ritual, and
embracing alike the insignificant details and
the momentous crises of existence. We should

212 ANIMISM

find fascinating the testimonies alike to com-
mon psychological trends — as in the almost
universal cult of the serpent, easily inter-
preted upon physical grounds — and to racial
peculiarities which led to specific contributions
which enriched later humanity, such as the
Greek devotion to the beautiful and the
Roman passion for legal formulation. But
this belongs to a different line of discussion.

We must, however, glance at two elements
in the case — conservatism and the social
fadlor.

By the first is meant that fear to change
methods and formulae (whether of words or of
acflion) which, however wrongly (because of
man's major fallacy, post hoc propter hoc),
were supposed to have efficacy. For the
existence of this there is abundant testimony.
From all quarters to observers of procedure
which to them, in their advanced stage of
culture, seems inherently irrational, who ask:
Why do you do this? or. Why do you do it
this way? the almost invariable answer comes,
Our fathers taught us to do it. Often there
is attached a further reason, clearly mytho-
logical or else supported by some supposedly
conclusive proof from experience, such as: If

WORSHIP 213

we did not, this or that dreadful thing would
happen just as it did to so and so who did it
another way or did not do it at all. In Nias
(Malaysia) in case of epidemic the cause is
often found in a desertion of the old ways,
and a renewal of vows to return to the earlier
order of things is believed to remove the
trouble.* Among the Pueblos the working
of this principle has been observed.

Of the two great forces which have hfted
humanity to the present plane of civilization
— imitation and invention — the latter has
been almost wholly suppressed by the
Pueblos.' * The result is exact reprodudlion
in both industry and religion." ^

And Todd's testimony is given again as fol-
lows: "Oral traditions and the 'customs that
are written within the book' . . . form the
social matrix and make up by far the larger
part of that social heredity which is the very
stuff of informal education, and the basis of
formal pedagogy." ^ From a different branch
of the American aborigines evidence of the ap-

' Frazer, Scapegoat, p. 115.

• Spencer, Education of the Pueblo Child.

' Todd, ne Primitive Family as an Educational Agency, p.

183.

* Todd, Primitive Family, p. 178.

214 ANIMISM

«

plication of this principle to ritual is given as
follows: "Any mistake made in singing these
(ritual) songs or in reciting the ritual (of the
Omahas) resulted in the early death of the
offender." '

The continuity of this extreme conservatism
can be traced in the area of ritual down to our
own times. Indeed it has become an axiom
among investigators both of religion and of
anthropology and folk-lore that the oldest
living remains we have are to be found in
ritual, whether of worship, work, or, strange
to say, play. The Brahmins have enshrined
in their writings the necessity of adhering with
the utmost fidelity to the words and adls, and
the very sequence of the same, to the end that
the sacrifice may be efFedtual. It is a matter
of history that Sumerian rituals which began
to be formulated in Babylonia perhaps as
early as the sixth or fifth millennium before
Christ were employed for a thousand or more
years after the Sumerian language had ceased
to be spoken, and this in order to gain effec-
tual approach to the gods. Several branches
of the Christian Church still employ languages
long defundl and unintelligible to the majority

• Fletcher and La Flesche, Anthropological Report, etc., p. 57S.

WORSHIP 215

of the worshipers, and this is done for no
reason that is intelUgible, or at least plausible,
to those not of the communions referred to.
Only a few years ago intense feeling was
caused in Greece over the proposed rendering
of the Greek of the New Testament into
modern Greek. In various other ways might
be demonstrated the tendency to a fixity in
ways of thinking about things, in modes of
adlion, and in methods of expression, and all
this as a characteristic native to man in all
stages of civilization and in all spheres of
aAion.

The second element includes the complex
results of many minds working on the same
problem. An ever stronger emphasis upon
the formative influence of the social faAor in
the development of mankind is laid by modern
investigators in anthropology and religion.
One way in which communal life worked was
the observation of details, supposed to be of
significance, which might or did escape the
notice of individuals. A gesture in a dance,
a chance occurrence in a ceremony, mere
coincidence in some totally unrelated phe-
nomena such as the. presence of a variegated
leaf or the simultaneous note of a bird or leap

2i6 ANIMISM

of an insedl — any of these or a thousand
other details marked at the time might come
to be considered essential parts or accom-
paniments of the performance, whatever it
was, thereafter to be included or simulated
whenever the results were sought again, with
the assumption that omission imperilled those
results. Here is one partial explanation of
the growing complexity of ceremonial up to a
certain point. It can be seen at once how
conservatism steps in here to preserve the
method of procedure thus arrived at.

But this social fadlor undoubtedly operated
also in a different way. The ways of seeing
and interpreting things differ among observers.
Man is an argumentative animal. Opinions
pro and contra passed, and one consequence
must have been a series of compromises in
which weight of opinion or authority produced
finally the formulae and methods most accept-
able to the community. Here is one door by
which probably entered what we know as
progress. The interest of the community,
clan, or tribe, we have seen, operated to
restridt and limit individual choice and initia-
tive. Society did at a certain stage, and
perhaps much earlier than any period of

WORSHIP 217

which we have diredl evidence, regard itself
as open to readlions from benefit or injury
done to non-human beings through the agency
of any one of its members. This being so,
the individual must adt with reference to the
welfare of the whole. It is at this point per-
tinent therefore to point to the entrance of
the ethical as distindt from what has so long
been regarded as the religious. To examine
this, however, would take us away from our
theme, as it belongs in an entirely different
field from that we now cultivate.

XVI
RESIDUA OF ANIMISM

XVI

RESIDUA OF ANIMISM

T^INALLY, we may register — no more
-^ than that — a few of the beliefs and
pradlices which, enduring through ages, were
the diredt legacy or proximate produdl of the
animistic stage.

First, of course, is the precious discovery of
the existence of soul in man, an inheritance
whose value has been ever more clearly
recognized as the centuries rolled by, until the
supreme expression of that value was given
by Jesus of Nazareth: What shall it profit
a man if he gain the whole world and lose his
own soul? The growing perception of the
soul's worth is measured in part by the devel-
opment of the ideas of heaven and hell as that
soul's reward or punishment. Anticipated
bliss or sorrow was magnified in proportion to
the enlarging estimates of the soul's worth.
The Greek idea of a shadowy existence after
death in a featureless place that almost voids
the idea of locality could not abide with a

222 ANIMISM

higher (Christian) estimate of soul values.
Even the Egyptians had a nobler realization
of those values, though it was nourished at
great loss — it cost them a really noble con-
ception of the being and nature of the gods.

Second, this conception of the soul thus
recognized involves another noteworthy be-
quest of animism, the notion of the continued
life of the soul beyond the grave. Primitive
races are quite logical in their dedudtion of
continued existence as an attribute or quality
of soul. It has incidentally been noted in the
preceding pages that whatever was conceived
as possessing soul was also believed to exist
beyond the grave. There the hunter, note,
was conceived to pursue shade of deer or
whatever animal had been the gain of his bow
or spear in this life. So that it was not man
in himself, apart from soul, that gained im-
mortality — or whatever proportion of imWr-
tality the primitive had acquired the power to
conceive — immortality belonged to soul itself.

If pradlical universality 6f belief and of
desire for the thing itself proves a dodtrine,
no tenet of our faith has surer basis than this
in existence after death. We have already
seen that the idea of continuance, which is

RESIDUA OF ANIMISM 223

the seed out of which the idea of real im-
mortality germinated, is found among all
primitive peoples. Moreover, all great reli-
gions but one have taken the idea into their
bosoms and made it central. The exception
is classic Buddhism. And the vigor and
tenacity of the dodirine of conscious life
beyond the grave has been too great for the
later followers of even the Buddha. For later
Buddhism too has its dodlrine of heaven and
hell in the forms of behef current for many
centuries. Not even the dodlrine of karma,
in its most absolute form, could withstand the
ardent longing of man and his invincible faith
that he is more than a bundle of conse-
quences to fall apart and cease to exist as an
entity when once he had persuaded himself
that such an effeA was possible. Elsewhere
than in Buddhism only sporadic agnostics
have^ventured a doubt or a denial of the
dodlrine. How insistent is the cry of humanity
for the boon of a continued conscious endurance
is evinced by this. In spite of the firm faith
of Christians in immortality, the assurance
of it (as it is sometimes expressed), this
longing and this faith compel even them to
look with desire upon results of investigations

224 ANIMISM

like those of the Society for Psychical Re-
search, if perchance scientific demonstration
can be made to confirm what is now the
produdl of belief.

The third legacy of animism is belief in
superhuman powers. Whether we regard this
from the standpoint of anthropology or culture,
or from that of ethics or of religion, it is
difficult to estimate, impossible to overesti-
mate, its importance. How vast a power of
restraint this belief has exerted as an inhibition
upon the lower passions of man, and how
great an impulse it has ever been to the growth
and unfolding of his higher nature! While it
is probably true that altruism has never in
the history of the race been absent in at least
germinal force — remember that it is not
absent in even brute creation — even yet its
greatest force as a determinative fadtor is
manifested only in the highly cultured.* The
impression of the existence of higher powers,
of superhuman or supernal forces, was neces-
sary during the disciplinary or elementary
stages of culture to control and to dired to
beneficent ends human thinking and adion.
Moreover, as has already been suggested,
angelology and demonology are traceable in

->

RESIDUA OF ANIMISM 225

aired: line to the set of conceptions we have
been following in their manifestations in
thought and adtion.

For these three greatest conceptions enter-
tained by humanity the race has to thank
the stage of culture we have been studying.

Besides the currents represented by the
dominant ideas just particularized other
thought channels exist in which flow streams
so strong as to warrant the use of the term
"instindtive." "I'm afraid to go home in the
dark," for instance, is the voicing of a dread
from which few are free. Granted that in
many or most cases this fear is implanted in
the young by tales of bogies or spirits told by
injudicious parents or other associates, the
psychologist can but note how readily the
idea is assimilated and how difficult it is, even
for the mature scientist (if he be frank with
himself), to rise superior to the fear and to
banish it utterly. The reason is, probably,
that the mind is in this matter super-receptive.
The channel has been worn in the thinking or
emotions of hundreds of ancestors, and the
grooves are transmitted. Open the sluice
gates to the idea, and it flows a muddy stream
through life.

226 ANIMISM

The savage of the stone age, cowering over
his campfire, casting fearful looks into the
jungle all about him, hearing in "the thousand
noises of the night the movements of myriads
of spirits whose existence is to him a reality,"
transmitted a frightful heritage of terror to
his far-off descendants. Against the effefls
of this heritage in the clear light of day and
the illumination of science and knowledge
men count themselves vidlors. But curiously
the shades of night banish self-acquired knowl-
edge, and the unknown and unseen open the
gates of emotion to unspoken and unconfessed
fears. In vain does the vidlim appeal to his
own "common sense." He knows the "super-
stition" is "foolish," "unscientific." But the
subconscious habit of thought, prenatally trans-
mitted, smothers his knowledge, and, given
the occasion and stimulus, dominates him in
spite of himself.

From the standpoint of pedagogics not yet
has sufficient allowance been made for this
heritage of fear. Parents, nurses, and com-
panions, mistakenly and often innocently,
sow and cultivate these weeds in a soil all too
well prepared by heritage. And the result is
that instead of a beautiful garden spot of

RESIDUA OF ANIMISM 227

trust and confidence and belief in the good, a
jungle or morass of noxious fears and dreads
mars for many the beauty of life.

Other residua less worthy, for the most
part now happily matters of history, at least
in the civilized world, have been hinted at in
the preceding pages. Most of these may be
classed under the head of s uperstitions, though
we are to bear in mind that these too have, at
least some of them, contrib uted to the advance
of mankind.^ They include the development
and^ pradlice of totemism and taboo, of magic
and divination with their nobler brother
prophecy, of mythology and witchcraft, and
of sacrifice in the ritual sense. When we have
shown the nature of animism, we have laid at
least one firm platform for the treatment of
these, so far at least as their objedtive side is
concerned. Then, too, the relative order or
the contemporaneity of magic and religion —
that vexed question — may receive illumina-
tion in pursuit of the consequences of the
fa(5ls here exhibited. But to trace these
developments is another task. Whether such
phenomena as those of fetishism are primary

1 Cf. Frazer, Psyche's Task; and NSH., article "Supersti-
tion."

228 ANIMISM

or secondary may also be possible of solution
in the light we have gained; and the varieties
of sacrifice fall easily into order as we start
from its foundation in animism as shown in
the fads here passed in review.

XVII

LITERATURE TO WHICH REFERENCE
IS MADE IN THIS VOLUME

PERIODICALS AND ABBREVIA-
TIONS USED

BW = Biblical World.

FL = Folk-lore.

FR = Fortnightly Review.

Gl = Globus.

ERE = Hastings, Selbie, and Gray, Ency-
clopedia of Religion and Ethics.

HR = Homiletic Review.

I A = Indian Antiquary.

lAE = Internationales Archiv fur Ethno-
graphie.

JAI = Journal of the Anthropological Institute.

JRP = Journal of Religious Psychology.

NGM = National Geographic Magazine.

NSH = New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia.

XVII

LITERATURE TO WHICH REFERENCE
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Brett, W. H., Indian Tribes of Guiana, New

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231

232 ANIMISM

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Brugsch, H. K., Religion und Mythologie der
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Burton, R. F., Wit and Wisdom from West
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Carpenter, J. E., Comparative Religion, Lon-
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Carruthers, D., Unknown Mongolia: A
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Chalmers, J. and Gill, W. W., Work and
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Clodd, Tom Tit Tot, London, 1898.

Clodd, Animism, London, 1905.

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Cox, M. R., Introdudion to Folk-lore, London
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Crooke, W., Tribes and Castes of the North-
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LITERATURE CONSULTED 233

Crooke, W., Popular Religion and Folk-lore
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Crooke, W., Natives of Northern India, Lon-
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CuRR, E. M., The Australian Race, 2 vols.,
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Gushing, F. H., Zuni Tales, New York, 1902.

D'Alviella, G., Hibbert Ledures, London,
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Dalyell, J. G., Darker Superstitions of Scot-
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Day, L. B., Folk Tales of Bengal, London and
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Decle, L., Three Tears in Savage Africa,
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Fletcher, A. C, See "American Ethnology."

Frazer, J. G., Golden Bough,^ London, 1900.

Frazer, J. G., Golden Bough,^ London, 1905 ff.

234 ANIMISM

(Includes Taboo and the Perils of the Soul;

Dying God; Magic Art and Evolution of

Kings; Spirits of Corn and Wild; Adonis,

Attis and Osiris; The Scapegoat, and

Balder the Beautiful.)
Frazer, J. G., Belief in Immortality and the

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Frazer, J. G., Psyche's Task, London, 1909.
Frere, Mary, Old Deccan Days, London,

1868.
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Furness, W. H., Home Life of Borneo Head

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Gomes, E. H., Seventeen Tears among the Sea

Dyaks of Borneo, Philadelphia, 191 1.
Granger, F., Worship of the Romans, London,

1895.
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Haddon, a. C, Head Hunters, London, 1901.
Hahn, T., Tsuni-Goam, the Supreme Being

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Halliday, W. R., Greek Divination, London,

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LITERATURE CONSULTED 235

Hamilton, Mary, Incubation, or the Cure oj

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Harrison, Jane Ellen, Prolegomena to the

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Hobhouse, L. T., Morals in Evolution, New

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KiDD, D., Savage Childhood, London, 1906.

236 ANIMISM

King, L, The Development of Religion. A

Study in Anthropology and Social Psy-
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1899.
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1914.
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McDougall, W., Body and Mind. A Study

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Mariner, W., Account of the Natives of the

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LITERATURE CONSULTED 237

Menzies, a., History of Religion, London,

1895-
Miles, C. A., Christmas in Ritual and Tradi-
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Miller, H., My Schools and Schoolmasters,

Edinburgh, 1854.
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New York, 191 2.
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New York, 191 3.
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Folklore in Southern India, Bombay, 1884.
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1911.
New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, 13 vols..

New York, 1906-14 (abbreviated NSH).
Newton, H., In Far New Guinea, London and

Philadelphia, 191 4.
Nivedita (Margaret E. Noble) and Coom-

ARASWAMY, A. K., Myths of the Hindus

and Buddhists, New York, 1914.
Parker, H., Village Folk Tales of Ceylon,

London, 1910-14.
Parker, Mrs. K. L., Euahlayi Tribe, London,

1905.
Pausanias, Description of Greece, ed. J. G.

Frazer, 6 vols., London, 1898.

238 ANIMISM

Petrie, W. M. F., Egyptian Tales, 2 series,

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Loeh's Classical Library, London, 1912.
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Reinach, S., Orpheus, New York, 1909.
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Rivers, W. H. R., History of Melanesian

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1894.
Smith, W. R., Kinship and Marriage in Early

Arabia, London, 1903.
Smyth, R. B., Aborigines of Vidoria, Mel-
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LITERATURE CONSULTED 239

Spence, L., Civilization of Ancient Mexico,
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Spencer, F. C, Education of the Pueblo Child,
New York, 1899.

Spencer, W. B. and Gillen, F. J., Native
Tribes of Central Australia, London, 1899.

Spencer, W. B. and Gillen, F. J., Northern
Tribes of Central Australia, London, 1904.

Spiegelberg, Demotische Papyri, Berlin, 1902.

Steel, F. A., Tales of the Punjab, London,
1894.

Steel, F. A. and Temple, R. C, Wide-Awake
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SwYNNERTON, C, Indian Nights Entertain-
ment, London, 1892.

Talbot, F. A., In the Shadow of the Bush, New
York, 191 2.

Taplin, G., The Narrinyeri, Native Tribes of
So. Australia, Adelaide, 1879.

Taylor, R., Te Ika a Maui, London, 1870.

Theophrastus, Charaderes ethici.

Thomas, N. W., Anthropological Report on
the Ibo-Speaking Peoples, London, 191 3.

240 ANIMISM

Thurston, E., Omens and Superstitions oj
Southern India, New York, 191 2.

Todd, A. J., The Primitive Family as an
Educational Agency, New York, 1913.

Tremearne, a. J. N., Tailed Head Hunters 0/
Nigeria, London, 191 2, and Ban of the
Bori, London, 1914.

Turner, G., Samoa a Hundred Tears Ago,
London, 1884.

Tylor, E. B., Primitive Culture, 2 vols., new
ed., London, 1903.

Underwood, H. G., Religions of Eastern Asia,
New York, 1910.

Vinson, J., Le Folk-Lore du Pays Basque,
Paris, 1883.

Weeks, J. H., Among the Primitive Bakongo,
Philadelphia, 1914.

Weeks, J. H., Among Congo Cannibals, Phila-
delphia, 191 3.

Werner, A., Native Races of British Central
Africa, London, 1906.

Westervelt, W. D., Legends of Maui, Lon-
don, 1913.

Wiedemann, A., Religion of the Ancient Egyp-
tians, New York, 1897.

WiLBERFORCE, B., Steps in Spiritual Growth,
London, 191 2.

LlTERArVRE CONSULTED 241

Wilkes, C, Narrative of the United States

Exploring Expedition, New York, 1851.
Williams, T., Fiji and the Fijians, London,

i860.
Williamson, R. W., Mafulu Mountain People

of British New Guinea, London, 191 2.
Williamson, R. W., The Ways of the South

Sea Savage . . . Solomon Islands and . . .

New Guinea, Philadelphia, 1914.
Wood, J. D., Manners and Customs of the

Native Tribes of South Australia, Adelaide,

1879.

INDEX

INDEX

Absence of Soul from

, Body, 26, 45, 51 ff., 100
Absentee soul, 51 fF.
"Accident" and the primitive,

30. 137 ff-
iEneas, descent of, 198
All Souls' Day, 187
Allen, Grant, 29 f.
Angelology, ancestry of, 99
Animals and dreams, 23

and soul, 19 ff., 86 ff.

as persons, 87 ff.

deceived by guile, 88

rationality of, 19 ff., 88 ff.

speech of, 90 ff.
Animism as thought, 15

definitions of, 7 ff., 14

residua of 220 ff.
Anpu and Bata, 54
ApoUonius of Tyana, 209
Approach to soul's home, 193 f.
Artifects, life in, 77 ff.
Assumption of animal form,

121 ff.
Aston, W. G., 10
Australians and totems, 8 f.

Babylonia, Spirits in, 105 f.
Barter and exchange, 209
Birth, miraculous, 56, 124

virgin, 124
Body and spirit, 32 ff., 120

Bogies, fear of, 225

Book of Thoth, 55

Breath and the soul, 26, 37 ff.

Brett, W. H., 143

Bridgman, Laura, and the

soul, 39
Buddha, 500 births of, 157
Buddhism and future life, 223
Bunce, Daniel, 139

Carnac, Stone of, 73
Catacombs, picture of soul in,

41
Ceremonial, complexity of, 216
Character of Spirit, dualism

of, loi
Christian eschatology, 183
Circe, 127

Clan feuds, results of, 136 f.
Clouds as persons, 69 f.
Communal factor in evolution,

21S
Communities of souls, 191 ff.
Complexity of ceremonial, 216
Conception, means of, 124 ff.
Confusion of primitive thought,

8ff.
Conservatism and ritual, 214
evil of, 213
rationale of, 212
Continuance a universal belief,

222 f.

24s

246

INDEX

"Continuance" of Soul, 147 fF.,

IJS ff., 222 f.
Crocodile, object of deceit, 88
Cult, significance of, 65

Dante on the Soul, 38

Dawson, J., 140

Dead languages, ritual use of,

214 f.
Dead, presence of, desired, 194

retinue of, in spirit world,
192
Death, and the soul, 22 ff., 26 ff.

by violence normal, 135 f.

not inevitable, 135 ff.

not normal, 29 ff.

through sorcery, 140 ff.,
184 f
Definitions of animism, 7 ff., 14
Deity and the ordeal, 28 i.
Demoniacs, 106, 115
Demonology, ancestry of, 99
Descensus Averni, 197 ff.
Diminution of soul's vitality,

157 ff-
Discarnate soul, condition of,

i6sff.
Disease demons, 115 f.
of thought, 89
through ghosts, 179
through witchcraft, 142
Disposition of ghost, 168 f.
Double, soul as the, 41, 80
Dreams and the departed, 32,
42, 149
and the ghost, 171
and the soul, 22 ff., 32, 42,
149

Dreams, of savages, 24 ff., 100

soul's wandering in, 52, 100

Dualism of Spirit character.

Early Belief in Future
Life, 147 ff.

Earth as mother, 67 f.

Ecstasy, significance of, 107,
174 ff.

Effigies at graves, 130 f., 192

Egoistic point of view, 208

Egyptian deities, transforma-
tions of, 122, 128
home of soul, 191

Enterprises, spirit influence on,
loi f.

Epimenides and wandering
soul, 53

Eschatology, Christian, 183

External souls, 45, 51 ff.

Fainting and Soul's Ab-
sence, 26, 51 f, 100
Fear and worship, 204, 207
Fetishism, 79

Feuds, results of clan, 136 i.
Fire as person, 72 f.
Folk-lore, significance of, 57,

6s ff.
Food, animate, 80

of souls, 167
Footmarks of soul, 41
Form of soul, 40 ff., 46, 165 ff.
Foundation sacrifice, 176
Frazer, J. G., 25 f , 125
"Free" spirits, 97 ff.

spirits, nature of, 102, loj ff.

INDEX

247

Future life a paradise, 193
animistic conception of, 222
early belief in, 147 ff.

Ghost and Prediction, 170 fF.

disposition of, 168 f., 176 fF.

greed of, 169 f.

in dreams, 171

knowledge of, 170

periodical return of, 187

powers of, 169 f.

wandering of, 185
Ghost's temporary release, 185
Ghosts and shamans, 175

as helpers, 175 f.

become demons, 161

become vampires, 162

death of, 150 f.

duties to, 178

inflict disease, 179

maleficent, 176 fF.

worship of, 180
Gods die, 151

Golden age beyond grave, 193
Gomes, E. H., 142
Granger, F., 24
Gratitude as source of worship,

207
Grave and the soul, 184 f.
Greed of ghost, 169

Harrison, J. E., 8 f.
Hartland, E. S., 13, 57. 7°
Head of deceased preserved,

194
Heiti-eibib, IS I
Hercules' descent, 198
Hermes Psychopompus, 43

Hermotimus and wandering

soul, 52 f.
Hezekiah and the soul, 189 f.
Hirata, prayer of, 98
Hobhouse, L. T., 9 f.
Home of soul, 183 fF.

soul variously placed, 187 fF.
Human form of soul, 40 IF.

soul in animals, 45, 54

soul in trees, 58
Humans, transformations of

126 ff.
Hunger of souls, 167 f.

Idolatry, 211
Illogicality, primitive, 28 fF.
Immortality, desire for, 223 f.
vs. continuance, 150 ff., 155 ff.
Implements, worship of, 77 ff.
Im Thurn, E. F., 14
Inanimate objects and soul,
12 ff., 63 ff., 66 ff.
things as murderers, 137
Individuality vs. solidarity, 208
Ingimund and Finns' souls,

Invisible nature spirits, 41 f.,

97 ff.
Ishtar, descent of, 197 f.
Izanagi, descent of, 197

Jacob, Dream of, 5 ff.
Jamblichus on dreams, 172 f.
Joshua and the witness stone,
Si-

Ka, the, 41, 80

Kaaba, sacred stones of, 75

Kabyles' trepanning, 11

248

INDEX

Kenaima, 142 f.

"Killing" of implements, 80 f.,

167
King, I., 20s
Kingsley, Miss, 12
Knowledge of ghost, 170

Lang, A., 89
Langdon, S., 67 f.
Lange, A., 85 f.
Lejeune, Pere, 13
Leopard-man, 127
Le Souef, A. A. C, 139
Life token, S3 ff-
Logicality of primitive thought,
IS

Magic as Cause of Death,
140 ff.

in Far East, 192

in transformations, 129 ff.

vs. worship, 207
Maleficent ghosts, 176 ff.
Man a duality, 22 ff., 33, 120

as measure of things, 62
MateriaUty of soul, 46 (.
Mating of different orders of

being, 123 ff.
Maui, descent of, 198

transformation of, 121
Menzies, A., 7
Metamorphosis, 119 ff.
Meteorites, divine, 6, 74 f.
Miraculous birth, 56, 124
Mountains as persons, 69 f.
Mulgewauke, 99
Multiple souls, 44 f , 54

Murder by inanimates, 137
Mutilated souls, 42 f., 166

Negative Confession, magi-
cal use of, 156

Neolithic man, 11

Neuhass, R., 141

Newton, H., 140

Numbers of "free" spirits,
97 ff.

Oak at Dodona, 84
Obassi Osaw, 121
Objects of worship, 210 ff.
Ogre and separate soul, 54
Old Testament, verification of,

174
Olympians, amours of, 123
Ono and fox-wife, 123
Ordeals, 28 f.

Parity of Being, 10, 12,

61 ff.
Paternity by lower orders,

12s ff.
"Possession" by souls, 173; by

spirits, 106, 114 f.
Power in relation to worship,

206 f
Powers of ghost, 169 f.
Prediction and ghosts, 170 ff.
Presence of deceased desired,

194
Primitive consciousness un-
integrated, 8 ff.
fancy, 28

thought logical, i;
Progress from compromise, 216

INDEX

249

Prophetic frenzy, 116
Puberty ceremonies, 192

Rainbow Alive, 76
Ramayana, 56
Reinach, S., 13
Reincarnation, 157 fF.
Residua of Animism, 220 ff.
Respect and worship, 204
Ritual and conservatism, 214
Rivers as persons, 71 f.

possess personahty, 71 f.
Rock, see Stone
Rocks as deceased ancestors,

IS9
RoUright, stones of, 73
Romanes, J. G., 20 ff.
Rupe, transformation of, 121

Sacrament as Ordeal, 28 f.
Sacred trees, 83 ff.
Samu Yalo, 151
Savages, dreams of, 24 ff.
Sea as person, 70 f.
Separable soul, 51 ff., 100
Serpent in Genesis, 91 f.
Serpent tribe, rationality of,
92
worship of, 92
Shadow and the soul, 43 ff.
Shamanism, iii
Shamans and ghosts, 175
Skulls trepanned, 11
Sky as father, 68 f.
Sleep and the soul, 22 ff.
Smith, W. R., 73
Smyth, R. B., 139
Snake worshiped, 4 f.
Snakes as soul-bearers, 158 f.

Social factor in evolution, 215
relations with worshiped,
205 ff.
Solidarity vs. individuality, 208
Sorcery, iii ff.

Soul absent in sleep, 24 ff., 100
and mutilations, 42 f., 166
and "possession," 173
and shadow, 43 ff.
and the grave, 184 f.
and the self, 39
condition of, and bodily

condition, i66 i.
constitution of, 37 ff., 46 f.
discamate, condition of,

165 ff.
discovery of, 19 ff.
discovery of, important, 221
disposition of, 168 i.
form of, 40 ff., 46, 165 ff.
form, transformation of, 166
home of, 183 ff.
human, in animals, 45, 54
in things, 12 ff., 63 ff., 66 ff.
invisible, 41
mutilated like body, 42 f.,

166
needs of, 167 ff.
non-human forms of, 46
several lives of, 150 f., 155 ff.
Soul's affection for home, 184 f.
footsteps traceable, 41
home duplicates earth, 190 ff.
life after death, 147 ff.
Souls, food of, 167
hunger of, 167 f.
mobility of, 26, 45, 51 ff.,
ic», 169 ff.

250

INDEX

Souls, multiple, 44 f., 54

voices of, 168
Speech of animals, 90 ff.
Spencer and Gillen, 140
Spirit, also see Soul
Spirit interpenetration by, 106,

125
world, varied character of,
189 ff.
Spirits as fathers, 124 ff.
become gods, 7
dispositions of, 108 f , 114 ff.
kinds of, 109 f.
mortal, no
needs of, 107 ff.
possession by, 106
senses of, 108
vengeful, 116
Stone, divinity of, 5 ff., 73 ff.

sentience of, 5, 73 ff.
Subterranean home of soul,

187 ff.
Suma snake, 3 ff.
Sun, human in form, 67
Superhuman powers, belief in,

224
Superhumans and the human

form, 121 ff.
Superstition, 22; ff.

Tammuz and Ishtar, 197
Taplin, G., 140
Thoth, book of, 55
Thought, "disease" of, 89
Thunder a person, 70
Tiger, object of deceit, 88
Todd, A. J., 126, 213
Tools, worship of, 77 ff.
Toothache, cure of, 4

Totems, 62 f , 89, 126
Transformations, 91, 121 ff.,

126 ff., 156 ff.
Transmigration, 157 ff.
Tree and human soul, 58

as oracle, 84
Tree planting at birth of

child, S7 f.
Trees punished for murder, 137

sacred, 83 ff.

souls of, 83 ff.
Trepanning, neolithic, il
Tylor, E. B., 7 f.

Ushabtiu, 130, 192

Vampires, ghosts as, 162
Vegetable world, soul in, 83 ff.
Virgin birth, 124
Voices of souls, 168

Wakonda, 62
Wete^^olves, 127
Wilberforce, Basil, 61
Wind as animate, 69
Witch as wave, 129
Witches, 114 f.
Wizardry, in f., 114 f.
Worship, 203 ff.

anthropopathic origin of,
203 ff.

a quid pro quo, 209

implications of, 203

not due to fear alone, 180

objects of, 180, 210 ff.

of ghosts, 180

of implements, 77 ff.

of stone, 5 f., 73 ff.
WuUunqua, 99, in

Yaka, no, 161